Name: Materialists
Director: Celine Song
Genre: Romance, Drama
Released: 2026-05-29
Duration: 116 min
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoë Winters, Marin Ireland

Materialists opens on the question most romances keep hidden: what a person is worth. Lucy works as a matchmaker in Manhattan, paid to turn longing into a spreadsheet of height, income, age and the other terms a client recites before love is allowed in. She does this well, and the city she does it in rewards the skill, treating the search for a partner as one more market with winners and listings and a fair price. Celine Song films that arithmetic without flinching. The surface is all clean lines and soft money, and the calm of it is the point.

Song’s wager is to let the look of wealth carry the argument. The rooms are uncluttered, the light is flattering, the clothes hang correctly, and nothing in the frame raises its voice. Lucy moves through this world as its most fluent translator, matching strangers by their stated terms, until the terms turn on her. The film asks whether a woman who sells compatibility for a living can still recognize the version of it that refuses to fit on the form.

The casting is the thesis. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy as composed surface, a woman who has made stillness into a professional instrument and cannot quite switch it off in private. Pedro Pascal takes Harry, the match who satisfies every metric, wealthy and gentle and correct, and is therefore faintly unreal, an answer with no friction in it. Chris Evans plays John, the ex, an actor whose career has not arrived and whose return reintroduces the one variable Lucy’s system cannot price. Three of the most likable faces in American film are arranged here as a problem rather than a fantasy.

Song arrives at this from Past Lives, the debut that turned restraint into a whole method, a love story measured in long silences and the things left unsaid. Materialists keeps the restraint and changes the subject. Where the first film watched feeling survive time and distance, the second watches it negotiate with money. The continuity is in the surface. This is a director who trusts a held shot and a quiet room to do the work other romances hand to a swelling score, and who treats what a scene withholds as more telling than what it declares.

The design does the talking. Courtship here is staged like a showroom: bodies presented, terms compared, the city’s glass and tailoring standing in for the promises being made. Song lets the camera admire the wealth and then lets Johnson’s face register the cost of admiring it. The title is also the method. The film photographs materialism precisely enough that the audience feels the pull of it before it feels the doubt, which is a harder and more honest trick than mocking the world from the outside.

The matchmaking business gives the film its cold comedy. Lucy can name a client’s market value in a sentence and does, and the people who pay her want exactly that clarity, a number where their anxiety used to be. Harry is what the numbers promise when they come true; John is what the numbers were built to screen out. The film keeps its sympathy with the system long enough to make Lucy’s eventual doubt cost something, instead of arriving as a slogan against money in the first reel.

What the film does not settle is whether it escapes its own surface. A romance this beautifully appointed risks selling the thing it means to question, since the suits and the apartments stay seductive whether or not the script disapproves of them. The triangle leans on charm, too, and casting actors this easy to forgive can soften an argument that wants teeth. A story about pricing desire still has to dramatize the moment the price stops mattering, which is far harder to stage than to state. Whether Materialists reaches that moment or simply frames it well is the open question the trailer cannot answer.

Song directs from her own screenplay, her second feature as writer-director. Dakota Johnson leads as Lucy, with Pedro Pascal as Harry and Chris Evans as John, and Zoë Winters and Marin Ireland filling out the world around them as Sophie and Violet. The film runs 116 minutes and sits between romance and drama without fully committing to the comfort of either, which is its own kind of nerve in a genre built to reassure. A24, the studio behind Past Lives, carries it again.

A24 released Materialists across most of the world last year, beginning in the United States at the start of summer and moving through Europe and Latin America over the months that followed. The rollout closes now in Japan, where the film reaches theaters on May 29 as マテリアリスト結婚の条件. A romance about timing arriving last in one of its largest markets is a fitting final note, proof that even a film about matching the right people at the right moment keeps its own schedule.