Materialists Isn’t Really a Love Triangle — It’s About What Happens When Dating Becomes a Marketplace

The easiest way to describe Materialists is as a love triangle. Lucy, a successful New York matchmaker played by Dakota Johnson, is caught between Harry, Pedro Pascal’s almost implausibly desirable wealthy bachelor, and John, Chris Evans’ struggling actor and former boyfriend. One man appears to satisfy the list. The other carries the history.

But Celine Song is not especially interested in asking which man Lucy should choose. That is the machinery of the movie, not its deepest subject.

The more unsettling question underneath Materialists is what happens when the language of markets becomes the language of intimacy. What happens when height, age, income, appearance, housing, profession and social status stop being incidental facts about a person and become the data through which that person is assigned romantic value?

That is why the film feels stranger, and sharper, than its glossy surfaces initially suggest. Lucy is not simply looking for love. She works inside an industry that promises to make love more efficient by converting human beings into searchable criteria.

And because she is very good at her job, she has learned to see herself through the same system.

The title tells us what the film is really about

Materialists is an unusually blunt title for a romance. It sounds almost accusatory. Yet Song’s film is less interested in condemning people for caring about money than in asking why modern romance makes it so difficult not to.

Lucy’s clients have requirements. They want particular ages, bodies, salaries, heights and lifestyles. Some of those preferences sound absurd when spoken aloud, but the mechanism is familiar. Dating apps already encourage people to sort one another through photographs, biographies, occupations, locations and filters. Matchmaking simply makes the transaction more explicit.

Song has described this framework as a contemporary version of the old marriage market. In a detailed Variety interview about the film, she connects Materialists to the economic logic running through Victorian romance: marriage has always involved questions of security, class and social value, even when stories prefer to call the result destiny.

The modern difference is the precision of the calculation. The market now has metrics.

Materialists is not asking whether money matters in love. It is asking what happens when money becomes one of the ways we decide who is worthy of love.

Lucy understands the system because she believes in it

Lucy would be a much less interesting character if she secretly hated matchmaking from the beginning. She does not. She understands its appeal, its logic and, crucially, its successes.

People come to her because they want uncertainty reduced. They are tired of bad dates, wasted time and relationships that fail to meet expectations. Lucy offers expertise. She can listen to a client describe what they want and translate desire into a set of characteristics that might actually be found.

There is something seductive about that promise. Romance is chaotic. A market offers order.

Lucy also knows that the market is not fair. Certain qualities are rewarded more heavily than others. A wealthy man can compensate for age. Height can function like capital. Beauty can raise perceived value. A woman’s age may be treated very differently from a man’s. People who insist they are searching for an emotional connection can still arrive with specifications that sound like procurement criteria.

Song’s sharpest decision is to make Lucy neither a villain nor an innocent trapped inside this machinery. She is a professional who has absorbed the machinery so completely that it shapes her private imagination.

Harry is what happens when a person satisfies the spreadsheet

Pedro Pascal’s Harry enters the film with the aura of a solution. He is handsome, sophisticated, wealthy and attentive. He lives in the kind of New York apartment that announces economic security before he needs to mention a number.

In the logic Lucy applies professionally, Harry is extraordinarily valuable.

That does not make him fake. One of the film’s smartest choices is refusing to reveal that the rich man is secretly awful so the audience can be pushed toward the poorer ex-boyfriend. Harry’s appeal is real. His generosity is real. His interest in Lucy is real. The comfort he represents is real too.

That matters because financial security is not a shallow fantasy when you have lived without it.

Lucy knows what scarcity feels like. She knows what it means to think about rent, restaurants, clothes and the practical limits imposed by money. Harry offers a life in which those calculations could become quieter. To dismiss that attraction as materialism would be to misunderstand the film’s title.

The problem is not that Lucy notices what Harry has. The problem is that a market has taught her to interpret what he has as evidence of what the relationship must be worth.

John is not automatically the more romantic answer

Chris Evans’ John occupies the opposite economic world. He is an actor without the success that would make the struggle charming. He shares a cramped apartment. His work is unstable. The relationship he once had with Lucy contains affection, attraction and familiarity, but it also contains the material pressures that helped break them apart.

A lesser romantic comedy would turn this into a simple moral equation: money is empty, poverty is authentic, therefore choose the man with less.

Materialists is more difficult than that.

John’s lack of money is not noble in itself. It creates genuine limitations. Love does not magically pay rent, remove resentment or eliminate the exhausting compromises that come with economic insecurity. Lucy is not wrong to remember those things.

That is why the triangle works best when Harry and John are understood not as luxury versus authenticity, but as two different challenges to Lucy’s certainty. Harry demonstrates that meeting the criteria cannot guarantee love. John demonstrates that love cannot make material reality disappear.

Neither man invalidates the other. Both expose the inadequacy of the formula.

New York is doing part of the matchmaking

The economics of Materialists are not confined to dialogue. They are built into the geography of the film.

Lucy moves through a New York in which neighbourhoods, apartments, restaurants, offices and wedding venues constantly communicate status. Space becomes another character attribute. Where someone lives tells us something about what they have, what they want and what kind of future they can plausibly offer.

Production designer Anthony Gasparro and set decorator Amy Silver were unusually explicit about this. In their discussion of the film’s New York environments, they explain how the characters’ neighbourhoods and interiors were designed around class. Lucy’s constrained Brooklyn space, Harry’s Tribeca luxury and John’s worn shared apartment are not simply attractive backdrops. They are economic biographies.

The contrast is especially effective because Song does not photograph wealth as a cartoon. Harry’s world is tasteful. It is quiet. It looks comfortable rather than vulgar. John’s apartment, meanwhile, is not the picturesque bohemian loft that movies often give struggling artists. It is cramped because being broke in New York is cramped.

The locations make Lucy’s dilemma physical. She is not choosing between abstract philosophies. She can walk into the different lives those philosophies might produce.

That production dimension is also why the Materialists production archive matters alongside the film’s romantic argument: the New York locations, interiors and production choices are part of how Song turns class from dialogue into something the audience can see.

Celine Song uses movie stars as market values too

There is another layer to the casting that makes the film’s argument almost mischievous.

Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans arrive with enormous amounts of cultural information attached to them. They are not anonymous faces. Audiences already understand them as desirable, famous and valuable performers before the story begins.

Song uses that knowledge rather than pretending it does not exist.

Pascal’s charisma helps make Harry’s desirability immediately legible. Evans carries the physical memory of a movie star even while John is presented as a man whose acting career has not delivered the success he wanted. Johnson’s composure makes Lucy convincing as someone who can professionally evaluate other people while keeping her own vulnerability tightly managed.

The result is a film about people being appraised that is itself built around actors whose images are constantly appraised by audiences, studios, advertisers and the entertainment industry.

That does not make the casting cynical. It makes it thematically precise.

Materialists understands that romance has always had economics

There is a temptation to treat app-era dating as though technology invented romantic calculation. It did not.

Marriage has been connected to property, inheritance, class, family and economic survival for centuries. Much of the great romantic literature that modern audiences read as stories of passion is structured around who can afford to marry whom, who possesses an income, who will inherit and what social position a union will create.

Materialists is therefore not really arguing that romance has been corrupted by modern capitalism. Its idea is more uncomfortable: the market was always nearby. Modern systems have simply made its language harder to hide.

A dating profile can turn a human life into a compact advertisement. A matchmaker can turn preference into searchable data. Social media can make lifestyle visible before two people have met. Salary, education, job title and postcode can become proxies for security, ambition or compatibility.

The danger begins when the proxy replaces the person.

A list can tell you whether somebody meets your requirements. It cannot tell you what their presence will mean to you.

The film’s darkest moment changes the meaning of the marketplace

For much of its running time, Materialists can play with the absurdity of romantic criteria. But the film eventually forces Lucy — and the audience — to confront the limits of treating matchmaking as a controlled transaction.

That tonal shift is important. Once people are reduced to attributes, the matchmaker’s confidence can begin to resemble a guarantee she cannot actually make. Compatibility data cannot fully predict character. A profile cannot reveal every danger. The person who appears correct on paper is still a person capable of choices that no system can safely quantify.

Song does not use that development merely to make the film darker. It challenges Lucy’s professional worldview. Her work depends on the idea that careful evaluation can meaningfully reduce romantic risk. The story reminds her that human beings are not products whose specifications can certify an outcome.

That is where the word “marketplace” stops being witty and becomes disturbing.

Past Lives asked who we might have been. Materialists asks what we think we deserve

Song’s second feature inevitably arrived beneath the shadow of Past Lives, but the two films approach romance from very different directions.

Past Lives is haunted by time, migration, memory and the lives that remain imaginable precisely because they were never lived. Its emotional power comes from recognising that love can be real without becoming possession.

Materialists is less ethereal. Its characters talk about money. They talk about bodies. They talk about age. They talk about the practical conditions under which relationships are expected to survive.

Yet both films are interested in the stories people construct around romantic choice.

Lucy’s story is that choosing correctly should be possible. If she can identify the right variables, she should be able to protect herself from the kind of relationship that asks too much and provides too little. The fantasy is not simply finding a rich man. The fantasy is eliminating uncertainty.

Love refuses to cooperate.

Even the film’s beauty is part of the argument

Materialists looks polished enough to be mistaken for the kind of romantic fantasy it is examining. That is useful.

The clothes are attractive. The restaurants are attractive. The weddings are attractive. Harry is attractive. New York frequently looks like a city in which a more expensive life might genuinely be a better one.

Song does not dismantle material desire by making material things ugly. She lets us understand why Lucy wants them.

That is a harder argument than simply telling an audience that money cannot buy happiness. Money buys privacy, comfort, beautiful space, freedom from certain forms of anxiety and access to experiences. Those things matter. Anyone pretending otherwise is offering a different kind of fantasy.

The film’s challenge is to separate the value of those things from the value of the person who possesses them.

A penthouse can be worth millions. That does not make its owner more capable of being loved.

The real romantic fantasy is being loved without being priced

A24’s official description of Materialists reduces the setup elegantly: a New York matchmaker is torn between the perfect match and her imperfect ex. That formulation contains the trap.

“Perfect” according to what?

The entire film is built around the instability of that word. Perfect can mean wealthy, tall, handsome, emotionally available, socially compatible and able to provide the future someone has imagined. But a person can satisfy an extraordinary number of conditions and still fail to produce the thing the conditions were supposed to predict.

Love is frustrating partly because it resists optimisation.

That does not mean standards are meaningless. It does not mean attraction is irrational or that practical compatibility should be ignored. Song is too intelligent about adult relationships to argue for romantic chaos as a virtue.

What Materialists questions is the moment when standards become valuation — when we stop asking whether another person is right for us and begin asking what they are worth.

That is why Materialists is more than a love triangle

The triangle gives the film shape. Harry and John allow Lucy to confront two futures, two economic realities and two definitions of what a successful romantic choice might look like.

But the real conflict is happening inside Lucy’s understanding of value.

She has built a career helping people turn desire into criteria. She has become fluent in the brutal mathematics of dating. She knows how the market ranks people, and she knows enough about her own past to understand why security can feel like love before love has had time to reveal itself.

What she has to rediscover is something her profession cannot comfortably measure.

A human being is not the sum of the advantages they bring to a relationship.

That sounds sentimental. Materialists spends nearly two hours showing why it is actually a radical proposition inside a culture built around comparison, optimisation and price.

The film begins with people trying to calculate what love should be worth.

Its most romantic idea is that a person was never merchandise in the first place.