Materialists, Celine Song’s follow-up to 2023’s much-acclaimed Past Lives, centers on a love triangle and a semi-autobiographical experience the way its predecessor had. But it otherwise doesn’t reheat a formula that garnered the then-first-time feature filmmaker Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscar nods. Past Lives — in which its happily married heroine (Greta Lee) was confronted with the possibility that she might have romantically ended up with a childhood friend (Teo Yoo) had her parents not moved the family from South Korea to the U.S. when she was a kid — was gracefully melancholy. Its elegance, though, sometimes made it feel overdetermined and emotionally hemmed in. Materialists, in contrast, is a little talkier and a little messier, dwelling less on the cruelties of circumstance and more the cruelties the pursuit of love can inspire. 

In Materialists, Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a 30-something who works for a high-end, Manhattan-based matchmaking service, Adore, one character likens to a luxury good. Responsible for nine successful pairings in her short career, she connects people based on what she hears during what play out not unlike job interviews. In this romantic comedy where the comedy tends to be more drily amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, those client meetings, which are depicted in percussive montages, are where the film comes closest to hilarity, airing out the almost-steroidal pickiness and optimization-mindedness the dating-app era has goaded. 

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Image credit: A24.