June 17th, 2025

Modern dating is an utter hellscape.

That seems to be the biggest point that writer/director Celine Song wants to get across with her sophomore film The Materialists. Song has cobbled together a cautionary tale for anyone wanting to find romance in the world, and the main point that she wants to get across is that we need to see people more as people and less as stats.

Dakota Johnson leads the picture playing Lucy, a matchmaker that works for high value clients looking for love. Lucy has an uncanny ability to break people down to their core values. Height, physique, earnings, charm, age, all of it goes into her notes, and she adds them all up to meet the specifications of another one of her clients. When their stats and desires align? A match can be made. And she’s good enough to know when the numbers make the most sense. It’s a sterile process, not unlike how the algorithms have begun to break down the world’s dating life, and social life, into easily chunked up targets. Not unlike AI models trying to pull out the important sections of an email, Lucy brings forth what these people need to know and passes it on.

But people aren’t numbers, and things get messy in a multitude of ways. Lucy begins dating Harry (Pedro Pascal), a man who checks every single one of her boxes. He’s tall, handsome, and insanely wealthy. Lucy wants to not want for things, she wants to go to dinner and not worry about it, she wants to feel comfortable in New York City, a place that’s increasingly become impossible for all but the ultra rich to feel that. Harry is the perfect package, and the first sign of trouble comes from Lucy who points out that her own stats do not lend themselves to being matched with a “unicorn” like Harry. But Harry ever the gentleman counters by saying that she is all he’s looking for, and that he’s selling herself short. A true gentleman to be sure.

The other side of the coin is Lucy’s undeniable attraction to her ex John (Chris Evans) who is a down on his luck actor barely able to afford rent in his apartment, that he shares with two roommates. He’s not what Lucy wants, sure he’s charming and attractive, but not being able to afford a night out or gas for his car is what put her at wits end in the first place. His stats don’t match her desires and while she cherishes his friendship, she’s enough of a self starter to see she’ll have to hustle to meet her dream man. But all the while he’s there for her. He doesn’t lash out when she starts dating Harry, he’s a true and honest friend to her. Because he doesn’t want to own her, he wants to love her as she is.

The film tells a story of class, and of what the heart wants. Harry and John are both smart, driven, and earnest in their courtship of Lucy. Making one of them cruel or mean would’ve made the story too simple. It’s about seeing people as they truly are, not what their job is, or how tall they are, or their physique, or even how charming they are. Modern dating, and the internet at large, has reduced us all to blips on a screen, something to be swiped away if it doesn’t serve us in the way that we expect. Why deal with inconvenience when we can click on the “Buy it now” button, or when we can scroll past to see an army of singles, each promising to be hotter, cooler, more successful than the last?

Much of what I loved about this film is that it’s moral is the antithesis of everything that terrifies me about social media. There is something more human about a person than just what an ad mogul working at Meta might think, and those little details are to be treasured all the more when we’re looking for someone to be buried next to. Try as it might, the internet cannot mine us for all of our parts, because more often than not there’s something ineffable about each and every one of us. It’s just up to all of us to try and see it.

4/5