Materialists opens with a deceptively simple idea: love, stripped of romance, can be engineered. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is not just any matchmaker; she is a highly successful one, a woman who treats human connection the way an accountant treats balance sheets. At Adore Matchmaking, she has helped nine couples walk down the aisle, and her methods are far from the swipe-and-hope culture of dating apps. Lucy pitches her clients – men and women alike – like products, presenting them to potential partners with calculated precision. Everything is data, compatibility, and return on emotional investment.
From the very beginning, the film confronts the uncomfortable truth behind why people seek marriage. Charlotte (Louisa Jacobson), one of Lucy’s clients, is getting married not because of love, passion, or even deep compatibility, but because her partner makes her feel valuable. Lucy doesn’t flinch at this confession. “I have heard every reason why a person wants to get married to someone. And none of them are shocking or wrong or crazy to me,” she says, and in that line alone, the film announces its tone: brutally honest, emotionally restrained, yet quietly tender.
Director and writer Celine Song doesn’t mock this worldview. Instead, she lets it breathe. The film treats marriage as a transaction, not in a cynical way, but in a disturbingly practical one. “Marriage is a business deal,” Lucy insists. “And you can opt out if the deal isn’t really good.” It’s a line that sounds cold, but in the context of a world filled with broken homes, emotional scarcity, and financial anxiety, it feels less cruel and more painfully realistic.
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Lucy herself is proof that this philosophy wasn’t born in comfort. She was raised poor, and she carries that history with her like a survival instinct. When she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a wealthy, charming, emotionally available suitor at Charlotte and Peter’s wedding, the contrast between her past and her present becomes sharper. Harry is everything Lucy’s system says she should want: stable, rich, kind, attentive. Their dates feel like well-rehearsed scenes from a romantic play, yet something keeps slipping through the cracks of her carefully constructed formula.
Then there is John (Chris Evans), her broke but sincere ex, someone who shares her background, her struggles, her emotional language. Where Harry represents security and polish, John represents familiarity and vulnerability. He doesn’t speak in strategy or outcomes; he speaks in feeling. And in one of their conversations, he asks a deceptively simple question: “Why does anybody even get married?” Lucy’s response is not poetic, but it is deeply human: “Because people tell them they should. And because they are lonely. And because they are hopeful. They want to do it differently than their parents.”
This is where Materialists truly finds its heartbeat. It stops being just a film about matchmaking and becomes a meditation on inherited trauma, emotional scarcity, and the quiet desperation to build something better than what we came from. Lucy’s calculations aren’t just about compatibility; they’re about survival. She doesn’t want to be poor again. She doesn’t want uncertainty. She doesn’t want to gamble with her future. And yet, love, by its very nature, is a gamble.
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The film raises questions it refuses to answer neatly: What really makes two people right for each other? Shared economic class? Political alignment? Physical attractiveness? Similar upbringing? Or something else entirely – something invisible, unmeasurable, and inconvenient to logic? Lucy believes love can be mapped, predicted, optimised. But the heart resists being reduced to numbers.
Dakota Johnson delivers a restrained, thoughtful performance that feels perfectly suited to Lucy’s emotional economy. She doesn’t cry easily. She doesn’t explode. Her pain is quiet, stored, intellectualised. Pedro Pascal brings warmth and grounded charm to Harry, never allowing him to become a caricature of wealth or convenience. And Chris Evans plays John with sincerity, emotional openness, and just enough vulnerability to make his character feel real rather than idealised.
Visually, the film mirrors Lucy’s emotional world: clean, composed, restrained. But beneath that polish is a constant tension between order and chaos, safety and risk, logic and longing. The pacing is gentle, almost conversational, allowing the ideas to sit with the viewer rather than rushing toward emotional climax.
Materialists doesn’t argue that love is irrational. Instead, it suggests that love is not enough on its own – and neither is logic. The film exists in the uneasy space between those two truths. Love may be the easiest thing to talk about, but it is the hardest thing to live with.
In the end, the question isn’t whether marriage is a business deal or a romantic fantasy. The question is whether it can be both – and whether we are brave enough to admit that sometimes we choose security over passion, comfort over connection, logic over longing. And whether that choice, in itself, is a form of love or simply a fear of losing.
Materialists doesn’t offer easy answers. It offers honest ones. And that honesty lingers long after the credits roll.
Materialists is streaming on Netflix.
