Review: Materialists (2025)
For the past two weeks, pundits and armchair politicos alike have struggled to explain Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. But those who saw A24’s sleeper romcom hit, Materialists, the week before could have easily predicted why an avowed socialist with almost no actual working-class support overwhelmingly carried America’s most ruthlessly superficial city.
The folks over at New York magazine called the latest from NYC-based filmmaker Celine Song a far cry from her multiple Oscar-nominated debut, Past Lives, in 2023. As Angelica Jade Bastién wrote in her comparison of the film to genre classics like Broadcast News and The Apartment, “They’re actually funny, and brimming with the tender considerations of what happens when actualized people crash into each other, professionally and romantically and emotionally.”
Of course the film critic for a publication that has become Mamdani’s own Tiger Beat would miss the film’s entire point. There is little tenderness left in the world to which Song introduces us.
Materialists is a rom-com about people whose fealty to the rattle and hum of NYC has not only made them lose their souls but forget they had them to begin with. It’s more dystopian in its own way than 28 Years Later, The Electric State, or Suzanne Collins’s latest The Hunger Games prequel, a movie in which commodification and status anxiety reach their logical corrosive conclusion.
As high-end professional matchmaker Lucy, Dakota Johnson never lets the audience forget she’s performing a role, a thirtysomething college dropout with an $80k a year salary who must steep herself in the parlance of luxury to survive. The other two sides of the film’s love triangle, Internet daddy Pedro Pascal and former Captain America Chris Evans, serve as cyphers–Song’s brilliant move to show the disconnect between her characters and the personas that made the careers of her actors.
By its lowkey finale, Materialists is less an inspiring romantic fantasy than a clear-eyed dissection of what life in a metropolis like NYC does to its inhabitants' moral fiber. Of course such people would see support for a lefty son of privilege like Mamdani as the haute couture of social capital. He’s an indulgence they hope can cure their spiritual bereftness in ways hot yoga never could; the type of character the trio at the center of Materialists would support, but one whose vision won’t keep them from falling any less short.
Materialists is now playing in theaters.