Materialists

Snapshot

Materialists is Celine Song's second feature, a New York romance built around a matchmaker, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), pulled between a wealthy, seemingly ideal suitor, Harry (Pedro Pascal), and her still-beloved, financially precarious ex, John (Chris Evans). Released by A24 in the summer of 2025, roughly two years after Song's Oscar-nominated debut Past Lives (2023), it arrived carrying the expectations of one of the most acclaimed first features of the decade. The film's central provocation is that it dresses itself in the costume of a glossy studio romance while quietly interrogating the machinery beneath modern courtship — the spreadsheets, height requirements, salary bands, and "market value" vocabulary through which contemporary dating quantifies human beings. Where Past Lives meditated on fate and the roads not taken, Materialists trains its attention on choice as transaction, love as an economy, and the discomfort of pricing a partner. It is at once more overtly commercial and more thematically austere than its predecessor, and that tension — luxe surface, cool interior — is the key to reading it.

Industry & production

The film is an A24 production, extending the studio's relationship with Song after the outsized success of Past Lives, which A24 shepherded to Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay nominations. That prior success materially shaped Materialists: it allowed Song to move up in budget and star wattage, assembling a marquee trio in Johnson, Pascal, and Evans, all of whom carry substantial commercial and franchise capital (Marvel, Fifty Shades, The Last of Us and The Mandalorian). This casting is itself an industrial statement — A24, historically associated with lower-budget auteur fare, deploying movie-star faces to sell a mid-budget adult drama, a category the studio system has largely abandoned.

The marketing positioned the film squarely as a romance, and part of its public story became the gap between that promise and the more melancholic, thornier object audiences encountered — a friction that recalls how films sold as escapist romance sometimes deliver something more unsettling. I should note plainly that I cannot responsibly cite specific budget or box-office figures here; the precise numbers are not something I can verify, and this dossier will not invent them. What can be said with confidence is that the film represents A24 testing whether an auteur-driven adult romance, powered by stars, can command theatrical attention in a marketplace dominated by IP.

Technology

On the specific capture technology — film stock versus digital, lenses, and finishing pipeline — the public record available to me is genuinely thin, and I will not fabricate technical specifications. What is legible is the aesthetic intent. The film pursues a polished, controlled image consistent with contemporary high-end digital or fine-grained photochemical work: clean, even, and deliberately un-showy, favoring naturalistic interiors — restaurants, apartments, matchmaking offices — over spectacle. If there is a "technological" argument in the film, it is diegetic rather than formal: the smartphone, the client database, the algorithmic logic of compatibility scoring. Song's material treats the app-and-spreadsheet apparatus of modern dating as the true technology under examination, a system that renders romance as data. The formal restraint of the filmmaking becomes a rebuke to that quantifying impulse — the camera insists on faces and silences that no metric can capture.

Technique

Cinematography

The photography favors composure and legibility over flourish. Song and her cinematographer build the film around framing that lets performance breathe — sustained two-shots across restaurant tables, considered eyelines, a preference for stillness that allows small shifts in expression to register. This is continuous with the visual sensibility of Past Lives, which used elegant, patient compositions and negative space to externalize longing. In Materialists, the affluent Manhattan settings — glass, marble, tasteful lighting — do double duty: they are seductive and slightly airless, the visual equivalent of a curated dating profile. On the specific cinematographer credit, I want to be careful: Past Lives was photographed by Shabier Kirchner, and there is strong stylistic continuity, but I cannot state with full certainty the exact camera department credits for Materialists and will not assert a name I cannot confirm.

Editing

The cutting is patient and conversation-driven, prioritizing the rhythm of dialogue and the pauses within it. Scenes are allowed to run to their emotional conclusions rather than being clipped for pace, a choice that aligns the film with theatrical dramaturgy — unsurprising given Song's origins on the stage. The editing withholds the reassuring momentum of a conventional rom-com; it lingers where a genre film would accelerate, producing the film's characteristic mood of hesitation and second-guessing.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Staging is where Song's playwriting is most visible. The film is organized around scenes of two or three people talking — negotiations of feeling conducted across tables, in doorways, in cars — blocked with a dramatist's attention to who sits where, who holds power, who is being appraised. Production and costume design encode the film's thesis in objects and surfaces: the difference between Harry's world (expensive, frictionless) and John's (cramped, improvised) is written in apartments, clothing, and the texture of spaces. The matchmaking office, with its files of human specifications, is staged as a kind of stock exchange for intimacy.

Sound

The soundscape favors intimacy and quiet, foregrounding dialogue and ambient city presence. I cannot confirm the specific composer credit for Materialists and will not invent one; Past Lives was scored by Daniel Rossen and Christopher Bear, whose restrained, melancholic work suited that film's register, but I should not assert their involvement here without confirmation. What is characteristic of Song's approach generally is the strategic use of silence — allowing unscored passages to carry emotional weight, so that music, when it arrives, functions as punctuation rather than wallpaper.

Performance

Performance is the film's engine. Johnson's Lucy is a study in composure and its cracks — a professional appraiser of others forced to confront her own valuation. Pascal plays Harry against easy villainy, making the "perfect match" a genuinely decent and appealing figure rather than a straw man, which sharpens the film's refusal of simple answers. Evans, cast against his heroic register, plays John's ordinariness and financial defeat with unglamorous honesty. The trio's work depends on restraint: the drama lives in what is not said across those long tables, in the gap between what these characters can articulate about love and what they feel.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film operates in a realist, dialogue-forward dramatic mode inherited from the theater and from a certain lineage of talky American and European relationship cinema. Its structure is a love triangle, one of the oldest engines in narrative, but Song treats the triangle less as a plot to be resolved than as a diagnostic device — a way of forcing her protagonist to name the criteria by which she chooses. The mode is deliberately anti-melodramatic: crises are underplayed, reversals are quiet, and the film resists the tidy catharsis its genre packaging promises. This produces a bittersweet, essayistic quality; the film thinks aloud about its subject even as it tells a story.

Genre & cycle

Materialists belongs to the romance and relationship-drama tradition, but its relationship to the romantic comedy is adversarial. It invokes the genre's furniture — the New York setting, the matchmaker premise, the triangle, the movie-star cast — while withholding the genre's reassurances. In this it participates in a broader cycle of 21st-century films that use the rom-com's shape to critique the conditions of modern courtship: the reduction of partners to profiles, the influence of wealth and "market logic" on intimacy. Its closest kinship is less with the classical screwball tradition than with contemporary relationship cinema that treats dating as a socioeconomic problem. The film's matchmaker frame also connects it, thematically if not tonally, to a long literary lineage of marriage-as-economics running back through Austen — courtship as a market in which people are ranked and matched.

Authorship & method

Celine Song is the film's decisive author: writer-director, Korean-Canadian, trained and established as a playwright before turning to film. Her method is rooted in autobiography refracted through structure. Past Lives drew on her own experience of a childhood connection reappearing in adulthood; Materialists draws on a lesser-known chapter of her biography — a stint working as a matchmaker in New York before her writing career took hold. That firsthand exposure to the literal business of pairing people, complete with client checklists and dealbreakers, is the film's authenticating source and the origin of its unsentimental view of the dating economy.

Song's authorship is characterized by patience, dialogue, and a refusal of neat resolution — hallmarks of a dramatist's sensibility carried into cinema. On her key below-the-line collaborators for Materialists specifically, I must be candid about the limits of what I can verify: I can identify the Past Lives team (cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, composers Daniel Rossen and Christopher Bear, editor Keith Fraase) and note the strong stylistic continuity between the two films, but I cannot confirm which of these collaborators returned for Materialists, and I will not present assumptions as fact. What can be stated is that the film bears the unmistakable imprint of a single controlling voice: Song's, extending across script, staging, and tone.

Movement / national cinema

The film sits at an interesting national and industrial crossroads. It is an American film — New York to its core — made by a Korean-Canadian immigrant artist, and it belongs to the broader flowering of diasporic and Asian-North-American filmmaking that has reshaped English-language auteur cinema in recent years. Song is frequently discussed alongside a cohort of filmmakers bringing immigrant and cross-cultural perspectives to intimate American stories. Institutionally, the film is a product of the A24 "movement" — less an aesthetic school than a distribution and branding phenomenon that has become the primary home for auteur-driven American cinema in the streaming era. Materialists is very much a New York film in the tradition of the city's romantic and relationship cinema, while its sensibility — restrained, observational, slightly cool — carries the influence of an art-cinema lineage broader than Hollywood.

Era / period

Made and set in the mid-2020s, Materialists is a distinctly post-app romance. It is legible only against a moment in which dating has been thoroughly platformed and quantified, in which "market value," compatibility metrics, and optimization have entered ordinary romantic vocabulary, and in which economic precarity — the gulf between the wealthy and the merely striving in a city like New York — shapes who can afford love and on what terms. The film's preoccupation with money and matching is not incidental; it is an artifact of an era of acute inequality and gamified intimacy. It also arrives in a period when the mid-budget adult drama has become an endangered species theatrically, which lends the film a certain rearguard, almost defiant quality as a piece of grown-up commercial cinema.

Themes

The governing theme is the commodification of love — the collision between romance understood as feeling and romance managed as a market. The film dramatizes the discomfort of appraising people: assigning value, weighing assets, treating partners as portfolios. From this flow its subsidiary concerns: the relationship between money and desirability; the difference between being chosen and being valued; the seduction and hollowness of the "perfect match"; and the question of whether love that resists optimization — inconvenient, unprofitable love — is folly or the only real thing. The matchmaker protagonist is the ideal vessel for these ideas: someone whose profession is the rationalization of romance, forced to test whether her own heart obeys her spreadsheets. Underneath runs a quieter meditation, continuous with Past Lives, on self-knowledge — on how difficult it is to know what, and whom, one actually wants beneath the criteria one has been taught to want by.

Reception, canon & influence

Critically, Materialists was received as a serious and ambitious second feature, though a more divisive one than Past Lives. Much of the discourse centered on the mismatch between marketing and object: viewers arriving for a light star-driven rom-com met a cooler, sadder, more essayistic film about money and value, and reactions split accordingly between those who admired its refusal of genre comfort and those who found it withholding. Because the film is recent — barely a year old at the time of writing — its critical record is still consolidating, and I want to be honest that any account of its "canonical" standing is necessarily provisional. I will not attribute specific reviews, quotations, or aggregate scores I cannot verify.

Its influences, running backward, are clearer than its legacy: the New York relationship film, the Austen-descended tradition of marriage-as-economics, the talky European and American art cinema of intimate dilemmas, and Song's own theatrical training. Its most immediate ancestor is Past Lives itself, whose sensibility it extends while pivoting from fate to choice, from the past's pull to the present's transactions.

Looking forward, its legacy cannot yet be fairly assessed, and claiming otherwise would be invention. What can reasonably be said is what the film contributes to an ongoing conversation: it consolidates Celine Song as a major authorial voice rather than a one-film phenomenon, and it stands as a notable attempt to keep the adult, star-driven, mid-budget romance alive as theatrical art at a moment when the form is imperiled. Whether it proves influential — whether it licenses other filmmakers to smuggle astringent social critique inside romantic packaging — is a story that has not yet been written, and this dossier declines to write it prematurely.