'MATERIALISTS' Is a Hallmark Movie in Faux Prestige Trappings

Celine Song’s Past Lives — a wistful love triangle between a Korean-American woman, her Korean ex who never quite aligned with her life, and the American man who did — was one of the best films of 2023. Emotionally decadent and raw, it boasted a trio of stunningly honest performances, a sharp script, and economical direction from Song. The first time I saw it, I thought it was great. The second time, I was completely bowled over. In 2025, Song returns to a similar formula: a materialistic matchmaker torn between a rich new suitor who checks every box and her ex, who is sweet but poor and otherwise ill-suited on paper. Whatever Song nailed with Past Lives, she gets absolutely wrong here.

Materialists doesn’t work at all. It’s plagued by sluggish pacing, an awkward script, static direction, monotone performances, all strange misgivings exacerbated by the absence of much in the way of a score. It is truly shockingly bad in almost every conceivable way; a Hallmark movie in faux-prestige trappings.

One of Materialists’ most obvious problems: Dakota Johnson is dreadful. A charisma black hole. And she’s in nearly every shot. Rather than inhabit the character, she seems to be reciting lines she just barely memorized before the cameras rolled. Pinging dialogue off her is like playing tennis with a wall. No one can rise to the occasion, though Pedro Pascal makes a noble attempt.

Johnson plays Lucy, a New York City matchmaker who treats marriage like a business transaction — a tidy checklist of salary, politics, height, and other Very Important Non-Negotiables. Lucy is tasked with pairing the city’s most desperate singles, all of whom bear corporately-inhuman Severance-esque monikers like Mark P. and Sophie S. Unsurprisingly, their so-called dealbreakers are purely superficial. The men are mostly crude and repugnant; the women, delusional and vapid. There’s exactly one client who doesn’t seem like an objectively awful human being — and she is inexplicably subjected to a sexual assault subplot. It’s framed as a kind of moral trial for Lucy, meant to challenge her ruthless pragmatism and push her toward some grand realization about the cost of commodifying romance. Instead, it mostly feels off-putting and opportunistic.

Materialist’s story follows Lucy’s meet-cute with Harry (Pedro Pascal), a stupidly wealthy, tall, fit, stylish, and kind suitor. He’s what Lucy’s industry calls a unicorn: a ten-out-of-ten in every measurable category. When Harry asks Lucy (a romantic pragmatist) out, she questions his motives but is quickly swept up in his charms. And his lavish spending. Their budding romance is complicated by the reappearance of John (Chris Evans), Lucy’s broke ex, a cater-waiter and struggling playwright. As Lucy tries to engineer her ideal romantic outcome, she’s forced to weigh Harry’s picture-perfect résumé against John’s obvious, if hopeless, adoration.

Sitting through nearly two hours of this is grueling. It’s as if time itself stops while Materialists drags on and on. Johnson’s co-stars fare marginally better with the material than she does but are let down by her flat performance, Song’s weirdly disinterested direction, and her lame script. Let’s be honest: Chris Evans is no Brando. He requires someone lift him up and when they do, he’s pretty decent. Johnson is never up to the task. And she’s the only one he ever shares a scene with. And their chemistry is the closest thing this film has to any discernible real human connection.

Johnson’s flatlined performance seeps into the fabric of the whole film, dragging everything down. Lucy repeatedly claims the best case scenario for a first date is not a second date but finding your eventual “grave buddy,” the person you’ll grow old and wrinkly with before dying side by side. Fitting, since acting opposite Johnson already feels like working with a corpse. She doesn’t just talk about grave buddies. She embodies one. Though not all of Materialists’ many problems lie at her feet. The script is also deeply flawed, populated by barely sketched caricatures with no dimension and no credible human behavior.

This same story has been told a hundred times — woman caught between the wealthy man in a suit and the soulful, broke artist. And mostly on Hallmark. Somehow, Materialists makes even that tired premise feel more tired. The veneer of prestige almost makes the whole thing more offensive. There’s simply nothing here to latch onto. Pedro Pascal’s Harry is charming because Pedro Pascal is charming, but the script gives him no texture, no interiority. We’re left filling in the blanks, usually with the suspicion that he’s secretly a nefarious cocaine smuggler or something. Because no human could actually be this one-dimensional, right? John doesn’t fare much better; he’s basically a puppy dog with Captain America’s chin. Attentive and obsessive to the point where at one point he appears to sleep on a NYC stoop waiting for Lucy from sundown to sunrise. We never really buy that either man should be fighting for Lucy in the first place. She’s attractive, sure, but also deeply uninteresting, vapid, and never once shown to be even a decent hang.

In theory, Materialists is a failed rom-com but it’s actually worse than that. Even setting aside the fact that it’s neither romantic nor funny, it also feels cataclysmic in all the wrong ways. Whatever sorcery Song conjured in Past Lives, she’s burned through it here. Maybe the production was rushed. Maybe her agents wanted her back in theaters ASAP to capitalize on the critical adoration of her debut. Maybe the casting trio just imploded. Maybe she needed a week of reshoots that her financiers denied her. Whatever the cause, this movie fundamentally does not work. Not on the page. Not in performance. Not in direction.

Everything feels cringe, false, and shapeless, which is heartbreaking, because Past Lives was so rich, so detailed, so full of lived-in interiority. This is the polar opposite. Even Song’s direction feels indifferent: long, static shots with no energy or point of view. Sophomore slump doesn’t begin to cover the overwhelming comedown that is Materialists. The disappointment is so thorough it almost makes me question if Past Lives was as good as I remember. But Song once made a film sing. We have to hope this out-of-tune disaster is just a false note in an otherwise impressive career.

CONCLUSION: A trainwreck of a rom-com that seems to have learned all the wrong lessons from what Past Lives did right, Materialists is poorly acted, weakly written, and directed with little energy and verve. What it does have to say about modern love or relationships is marred by garbled execution. For writer-director Celine Song, it’s a staggering misstep; a massive disappointment from a filmmaker we’ve seen is capable of so much more.