Materialists
Landmark Ritz Five
214 Walnut St.
Philadelphia
June 16, 2025
Director Celine Song’s latest film Materialists starts with the lanky Dakota Johnson catwalking her way through Manhattan, sashaying past any opening credits as an original Japanese Breakfast track breathes Parisienne-inspired alt-pop into the scene.
Was this a movie or a music video? A film with serious intentions or a slutty sales pitch for self-centeredness?
Materialists is Song’s most recent release since her 2023 film Past Lives, an autobiographical story about “inyeon,” the Korean concept of fated love. “My Baby (Got Nothing At All),” the single that Song commissioned from Michelle Zauner of Philadelphia DIY band Japanese Breakfast as a catchy overture for the movie, is the band’s epilogue to its new album Songs for Melancholy Brunettes and Sad Women.
Materialists might have been a better movie if it stole what Zauner described in Stereogum as her “semi-obnoxious, divisive” album title inspired by a John Cheever short story. But Materialists is not for pensive women or people; it’s unabashedly for the materialists among us.
The well-marketed, A24 project boasts a nearly two-hour run time, an original score, an all-star cast of supremely good-looking actors (Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, Chris Evans, and, as a side character, the infamous Dasha Nekrasova from the podcast Red Scare), a $20 million budget, and, of course, a renowned director and writer. But for all its glossy good looks and prestige, its fatal flaw is the same problem that plagues its protagonist: A lack of interest in character.
The main character is not Dakota Johnson, who plays a 30-something woman named Lucy looking not for love but for a wealthy husband. The main character is her job as a professional matchmaker. Her two suitors — a broke ex versus a millionaire meet-cute — are also plot devices to explore the movie’s thesis on marriage more so than they are representations of actual people.
Song worked as a matchmaker herself in a past life (her 20s). Her experience lends itself well to the dark revelations of what modern partnership is about: “No fatties. No Blacks. No women over 29,” clients chant repeatedly to Lucy as she intakes their long lists of prejudicial expectations for potential partners. Personal financial strife in her upbringing and past relationships paired with this job convince Lucy that human value is determined by cash flow and physical assets.
Whereas Song is a serious romantic whose career as an artist has hinged on her belief in soulmates, Lucy is a retired actress interested exclusively in working her way out of standard student loan debt and finding a wealthy husband.
It’s not until Lucy sets up a repeatedly rejected client with a man who sexually assaults her that she starts to question this philosophy. She confronts the fact that she knows nothing about the character of the people she works with; she cares only about their hair lines, BMIs and resumes. This is when the audience realizes that we similarly know little about Lucy; all she does is make deals and look beautiful in business casual clothes.
The assault, inexplicably, serves as the pivotal plot twist towards romantic resolution. Lucy breaks up with the generous finance bro who was ready to propose after a few passionless dates: “Marriage is a business exchange, but love has to be on the table,” she informs him. He asks to take her up on her matchmaking services.
She then accepts a sales pitch from her ex, for whom she still has feelings: He promises to take up more hours at work if only she’ll date him again. The end credits observe the pair signing a marriage contract among a barrage of other couples at City Hall. It’s the final transaction.
We take it for granted that Lucy knows what love is. But the audience never gets to feel or see what’s real about her love life, because Song is too caught up in flashing shots of Pedro Pascal’s interior design scheme and writing meta dialogue about desire to bother imbuing any complexity into her characters.
Amid a recent dearth of quality romantic comedies, Materialists positions itself as a fresh addition to an implicitly clichéd canon. But while Song structures her story around the tropes and conventions that define the genre — first a love triangle, then a happily-ever-after, Chris Evans as the crush and New York City as the backdrop — the movie is neither funny nor really romantic.
Materialists is not an homage to or revival of the romantic comedy, but a slap in its face. The rom com might be clichéd, but that’s because of its implicit emotive power. The original Materialists might be the 1955 movie Marty, in which a bachelor’s egocentric friends and family sabotage his connection with a woman by attacking her looks. It’s a heart-swelling moment when he ditches the crowd and chooses her.
The love triangle at the center of Song’s story is not a thoughtful microcosm of the interpersonal dynamics the director claims to be interested in, but rather a cocoon of male attention surrounding a wet dream of a woman who never really struggles, but merely chooses her favorite of two good men. It’s all too easy.
Song should’ve taken some clues from other contemporary filmmakers interested in human systems over individual portraits. Ruben Ostlund’s The Square or Triangle of Sadness, for example, are two dark comedies that examine the circular conflict of wealth disparity in ways that could’ve inspired Song to successfully subvert the rom com genre by more clearly articulating the sometimes nefarious nuances of 21st century courtship.
The script is a dialogue of ideas that starts off ambitious in its examination of commodified attraction before settling for the kind of soulless conclusion it warns the audience from pursuing. The movie sells itself out by following convention over passion.
The Song, On The Other Hand ...
The movie is, at best, a backwards commercial for Japanese Breakfast.
In under four minutes, Zauner’s commissioned track establishes a warmhearted twang, longing tone and dissatisfied resignation: “My baby, he don’t have nothing to give but he gives it me,” the song goes.
The single is the follow-up to the band’s first album recorded in a studio rather than a DIY space. The investment pays off; Songs for Melancholy Brunettes and Sad Women is a more thoughtful expression than Materialists of loneliness and isolation in love.
“Sucked you off by the AC Unit, caught your breath while the evening steeped,” Zauner sets the scene in “Mega Circuit," a piece from midway through the fresh record. The vision isn’t pretty, but it’s sensorial. Her chosen term of endearment throughout the album is “baby,” which simultaneously hits on so-called “masculinity crisis.” Actor Jeff Bridges lends his sandy voice to a track called “men in bars.”
Zauner's perspective is not entitled and myopic, like Lucy's, but curious and expansive; she, like Ruben Ostlund, looks not just at the suffering of individuals, but at the ways we all use one another for our own purposes: "I'm thinking of all the Grecian Gods, the men they all play to get what they want," is a line that stands out.
Songs for Melancholy Brunettes and Sad Women is an experimental attempt at making music that leaves a lasting impression. It’s a testament to the spirited, do-it-yourself spunk of Philadelphia.
Materialists, for all the time and money invested into it, is akin to a forgettable one-night stand. It’s not a love note to New York, but a reckoning with the fact that the overpriced city has become a ghost town of sentimentalism.
