The opening voiceover sounds pulled from a 1990s trailer, all warmth and cue cards. Celine Song borrows that comfort on purpose, then spends the rest of the film taking it apart.
Dakota Johnson plays Lucy as a New York matchmaker. She has closed nine weddings for clients and still swipes on a dating app of her own between meetings.
Chris Evans plays John, a struggling actor who pays rent through catering shifts. Casting Captain America as the broke ex is the joke, and Evans sells it by playing John completely straight.
Pedro Pascal shows up as Harry, a private equity investor whose money never looks hard won. Lucy's job trained her to price exactly that kind of comfort.
One scene has a client list requirements like a spec sheet, starting with height over six feet and an income above $500,000. Five real matchmakers told Time magazine after the film came out that clients do ask about income, but salary rarely decides a match the way the film suggests.
Celine Song worked as a matchmaker before she wrote the film.
John crashes back into Lucy's life at a wedding where she is working. Their old rhythm returns before either of them can stop it.
Harry courts Lucy with rooftop dinners and a skyline view that costs money to rent. The film keeps filming romance and spending in the same shot until you cannot tell them apart.
Lucy runs a matchmaking firm and still swipes on a dating app on her own time. Nobody in her business, Lucy included, fully trusts the process she sells to clients.
A montage stacks Harry's dates on top of each other, champagne included, yachts included. Lucy's attention keeps sliding off Harry and onto John, and the camera lets you watch her notice it happen.
The poster outside John's play credits a work called Tom and Eliza. Celine Song wrote and staged that exact play off-off-Broadway in 2016, years before she wrote this film.
Harry and John meet face to face at the theater, and it plays like two men sizing up the same territory. Pascal stays smooth, Evans stays sincere, and neither man breaks first.
The two men trade digs without raising their voices, which is closer to how men actually fight over a woman in a crowded room. A24 does not need a thrown punch to make a love triangle land.
Lucy keeps catching her own reflection and looking away from it fast. She is not admiring herself. She is checking whether she still recognizes the person her job has made her.
Lucy watches a client's wedding from the side of the room. She looks proud of the match she built and somewhere else entirely at the same time.
John's play opens to a good reception, and Lucy watches from the audience with an expression that is not quite happiness. She is doing the math on the life she would have had if she had kept acting instead of matchmaking.
Harry collects vintage typewriters. That is the whole beat, and it works because the film never explains it.
Lucy has a full breakdown in a karaoke bar, belting a '90s ballad with her mascara running. Dakota Johnson commits to the scene like it carries the whole movie.
New York looks like money through most of the film, glass towers and gold light. The film turns that shine against Lucy on purpose, because a city this polished makes her loneliness look polished too.
John tells Lucy he still loves her. Is that love talking, or seven years of shared history talking? Probably both, and the film never bothers separating the two.
Harry offers Lucy a version of a perfect life, and his eyes stay somewhere else while he does it. He loves an idea of Lucy, not the specific, difficult person standing in front of him.
Lucy tells both men, in separate scenes, that neither one holds the answer to her problem. The real argument was happening inside her own head the entire time.
The final party scene crowds everyone into one room, and Lucy spends most of it dodging both men at once. It plays like the most expensive game of tag in the movie.
The ending is not ambiguous, whatever the marketing wants you to think. Lucy chooses John, and he proposes to her in Central Park before the credits roll.
A post-credits scene shows Lucy and John filling out marriage license paperwork at a city clerk's office, the least romantic room in the film. That gap explains the title. Materialists spends two hours pricing love like a financial asset, then closes the story inside a government office that reduces the same love to a form.
I spend my working life building systems that rank, score, and price things that resist being priced honestly. Watching Lucy build a business on that exact instinct, then watch it fail her at the one moment that mattered, is the most convincing argument the film makes. An algorithm can rank height and income. It cannot rank whether someone actually sees you.
Related reading: One Empty Car on the Ferris Wheel and Her (2013): AI Ethics and Cultural Impact.
This feels like a modern dating mirror. It looks familiar but cuts much deeper.
Here's the TL;DR version of this:
• The film disguises critique as nostalgia.
• Self-worth is the true choice, not romance.
• Dating apps commodify intimacy subtly.
• Irony drives the character dynamics.
• The ending resists easy moral closure.