FILM OF THE WEEK: Materialists - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Celine Song’s Materialists is a film teeming with fascinating, timely questions about love under late capitalism, the commodification of desire and how much (or little) we’ve evolved since the days of Austen and Wharton. But where Song’s debut Past Lives was suffused with quiet beauty and irresistible emotional depth, Materialists feels curiously hollow. It’s elegant, ambitious, and glinting with insight. What it is not, however, is emotionally convincing.

At the film’s centre is Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a high-end matchmaker who peddles idealised versions of monogamy to New York’s most powerful, entitled and insecure singles. Johnson plays her as the archetypal Cool Girl: sleek, languorous, and blank. She’s meant to be enigmatic, but she comes off as empty; a cipher with no discernible personality, interests, or friends, which makes the idea that multiple men fall hopelessly in love with her feel less like a romantic dilemma and more like a glitch in the screenplay. There is an uncanny parallel between Lucy and Johnson’s role as Anastasia from 50 Shades of Grey, who was a deliberately blank and bland character, designed so that lovers of the fan fiction series could project themselves onto her.

Lucy isn’t as guileless or naïve as Anastasia, but she is comparably underdeveloped – and both films proffer that underdeveloped brunette characters are catnip for sexy millionaires and every other male character who appears onscreen. There’s no chemistry between Lucy and either of her suitors - Pedro Pascal’s polished financier or Chris Evans’ struggling cater-waiter ex – either in the performances or in the script. Without that charge, the central triangle wilts, with the resolution feeling unearned and hollow.

That emotional hollowness haunts the film. Despite Song’s sharp, often devastating observations - the brutal clarity of a male client dismissing women for being over 30, women having height and income demands for men, a bride admitting she chose her partner for the status boost - the narrative never seems to know what it wants to feel. Materialists is full of ideas, but doesn’t follow any of them to a truly satisfying conclusion. Gender roles, economic power, aesthetic value, internalised misogyny: they all shimmer on the surface, but the film never quite dives in, which is a shame given the prescience of the subject matter. Given the rollback on women’s rights; a return to regressive gender roles and trad wives; disturbing dating trends couched in economic terms like ‘high value man/woman’ with sexism inherent within the evaluations; and the housing and cost of living crisis which is forcing many couples to get together or stay together out of financial necessity, there is much to examine.

There’s a very particular timeliness to the themes of love and money – explored at length throughout all the works of Austen, due to be remade for our screens yet again with new adaptations of both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility on the way – that could cut very deeply indeed. Other recent cultural touchstones have done so brilliantly, with Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s books Fleishman Is In Trouble and Long Island Compromise exploring money and gender and familial wealth, trauma, and privilege respectively; and Shon Faye’s memoir Love In Exile exploring heteronormativity in exile. But Materialists raises questions and makes quips without going deeper, and a subplot with a real sense of danger doesn't seem to gel. The film gestures at critique, but undercuts itself with a conventional ending and a heroine who ultimately seems less conflicted than conveniently pliable.

One of the film’s best scenes, ironically, is one of the few that features no romance at all. Lucy comforts a panicked bride just before the ceremony, teasing out the uncomfortable truth beneath her anxiety: that her engagement isn’t about love but about one-upping her sister. “He makes you feel valuable,” Lucy says, with the tone of a therapist but echoing the transactional logic that underpins the whole film. The moment is crystalline and damning - and makes you wish the rest of the script had the same bite. There’s also an interesting about money and friendship, as wealthy gatherings have the cool soullessness of a networking events, while scenes between less privileged people - a grimy artist party, a chaotic barn wedding – feel far more human and warm.

Not that Lucy herself has any friends. Instead, Materialists surrounds Lucy with women who are either desperate, vacuous, or both. Scenes where hoards of blonde women in high heels squeal maniacally in the background feel like a deliberate joke – but the punchline lands on women, rather than the culture at large. For a film preoccupied with power and gender, the imbalance feels like a blind spot.

Then there’s the fantasy of Lucy’s lifestyle, which doesn’t even make sense within the film’s own economic logic. We’re told she makes $80,000 a year - modest by New York standards - but she lives in a pristine apartment, wears high-end fashion, and seems never to cook or economise. There’s no trust fund, no side hustle, no visible financial scaffolding. For a story so attuned to the brutal calculus of dating economics, this is a frustrating inconsistency.

And yet, for all its flaws, Materialists is never boring. It’s stylish and beautifully made, with sharp dialogue and a high-gloss visual palette. Song is a perceptive, ambitious filmmaker, and her script brims with cultural relevance. In its most lucid moments, the film captures the surreal spreadsheet logic and scarcity mindset of modern dating. It’s Sex and the City shot through with Edith Wharton, filtered through the language of pitch decks and podcasts, and its undeniably engaging.

But Materialists can’t quite decide whether it wants to satirise this world or romanticise it. It raises big, knotty questions about value, gender, class, the tension between love and social mobility, but doesn’t land on any answers. Or, worse, it lands on the most convenient ones.

Celine Song set out to show how love, in this gilded age, has become another form of capital. That message lands, but without real emotional stakes or characters with believable inner lives, Materialists ends up feeling like its heroine: immaculate, intriguing, but ultimately unknowable. It's the kind of film you admire - but don’t believe in.

• Watch the trailer below: