Materialists Has the Cast to Make the Choice Impossible, and a Screenplay That Refuses To
Celine Song's follow-up to Past Lives has two of the most compelling screen presences working today and a script that, at its midpoint, decides one of them is too much trouble.
By MIGUEL MATEO | JUNE 13, 2025
There is something almost disorienting about watching Materialists go wrong. Celine Song's second feature arrives positioned as a romantic triangle about Lucy, a New York City matchmaker played by Dakota Johnson, caught between her charming, broke ex-boyfriend John and Harry, the quietly magnetic financier she has been hired to set up with someone else. For a full half of its running time, the film makes genuine good on that setup, staging a contest so evenly matched that the outcome reads as legitimately uncertain. Then something shifts, and the movie you were watching quietly becomes a different, lesser one.
Chris Evans is a revelation as John. Playing the scrappy ex with history on his side, Evans delivers what may be his best work as a screen presence, and the performance has almost nothing to do with the franchise armor he wore for a decade. What he offers here is something more vulnerable and more alive: impassioned eyes, an effervescent warmth that reads as simultaneously magnetic and slightly dangerous, and a quality of openness that pulls the audience into his corner almost against their better judgment. John is funny and desperate and fully legible in ways the character needs to be, and Song's camera finds in Evans something the Marvel films never thought to look for.
Pedro Pascal does something harder alongside him. As Harry, the wealthy suitor who arrives with all the markers of perfection, Pascal performs desire through restraint, a quietly palpable charisma that never announces itself but somehow fills every scene it occupies. Harry's scenes with Lucy are charged and careful, two people circling something they are both cautious about naming, and they represent the film's highest achievement. Harry as written is perceptive, emotionally attuned, and genuinely worthy of consideration, and Pascal makes him more than worthy. For a stretch in the middle of the film, the audience is faced with a real choice, which is exactly what a romantic triangle should do.
Which is what makes the screenplay's pivot so damaging. Somewhere around the midpoint, Materialists seems to lose its nerve. Harry, built across the first half with genuine three-dimensionality, is quietly flattened and then eased toward the exit. His complexity drains away as though the screenplay belatedly noticed it had written itself into a corner, had made the alternative too attractive, and decided to resolve the problem by making Harry simpler rather than by trusting the audience with the difficulty. What had been a character becomes a symbol, and Pascal, so formidable and so good in everything he was given, is left with almost nothing to do on his way out the door.
Dakota Johnson is well-served by the material for most of the running time. Lucy's cool professionalism, her slightly aloof remove, fits Johnson's natural register with a comfort that suggests Song identified exactly what her leading lady does well. But as the film moves into its more emotionally exposed second half and asks Lucy to crack open, the limitations of Johnson's range become harder to look past. It is not that she is miscast so much as that she has been asked to carry more than the performance can bear, and the contrast with what Evans and Pascal bring to their roles throws that gap into sharper relief.
Celine Song's debut, Past Lives, remains one of the decade's finest films about love and longing, a work of extraordinary emotional intelligence that understood exactly how to hold two irreconcilable desires in the same frame without resolving the tension too neatly. Knowing that, Materialists registers as more than just a modest disappointment. It has the premise. It has the performances. It has, for a substantial portion of its runtime, the makings of something Song was uniquely equipped to deliver. That the film ultimately flinches at the moment that demands courage is its real failure. The two performances at its center deserved a screenplay that was as brave as they are.
Rating: ★★1/2 out of ★★★★★