“The Materialists” tackles the dangers of modern-day dating. But is it effective?

*Spoilers ahead*

Two years after her buzzy directorial debut Past Lives, Celine Song is back with an A-list cast and another A24 romance.

Past Lives was, for me, an 인생영화, or a lifetime movie. I saw so many of its themes in my and my family members’ lives that I could not help but wholly immerse myself in the world and feel mildly offended if someone gave a negative review. This is all to say that I went into The Materialists with high, high expectations.

Let me start by saying: there was a lot that I enjoyed about The Materialists. It’s funny. It keeps you on your toes. It’s thought-provoking. Celine Song, with her playwright origins, knows how to build tension with her snappy dialogue. I would 100 percent see the movie again.

The Materialists satisfies our rom-com cravings by following the formulas of well-known films. Its plot parallels The Devil Wears Prada: Lucy, an upstart thin White woman (Dakota Johnson with an Anne Hathaway haircut) climbs the ranks of a glitzy job at the NYC matchmaking company Adore and suffers a moral reckoning at the cusp of her career ascent. Song (and her husband, for that matter) have nailed writing the heroine stuck in a yearning love triangle between the rich man and the poor man—like we see every K-drama, rom-coms like The Notebook and Bridget Jones’ Diary, and Song’s own debut movie.

Song, inspired by her six-month stint as a matchmaker in New York, captures on-point snapshots of what dating is like for both upper-crust Manhattanites and upper-income people everywhere—a marriage is, as she notes, a business deal, where you evaluate the economic potential of your partner and the familial wealth that they bring into the negotiation. Her thesis is grounded in fact: studies show that a huge predictor of matrimony in the U.S. is similar socioeconomic backgrounds, contributing to the ever-widening wealth gap.

Lucy, by only catering to clients who are in the top 1%, has already increased her success rate within the matchmaking pool. Every marriage is a notch in her matchmaker belt. Towards the beginning of the movie, Lucy calms down a client suffering last-minute panic attacks right before walking down the aisle. “In the deepest, darkest part of you, what is the real reason you want to get married to him?” Lucy asks her. “He makes my sister feel jealous,” the bride confesses. “So he makes you feel valuable,” Lucy reassures. The bride, feeling seen, ecstatically rejoins the wedding ceremony.

Then, the movie veers into not-your-typical-romcom. Halfway through the film, Song introduces a shocking central conflict: Lucy’s favorite client, Sophie, is sexually assaulted by a man Lucy introduced her to. The tone shifts quite suddenly from a bubbly “which-guy-will-Lucy-choose” to a serious legal dispute and ethical reckoning for Lucy.

Sophie sues Adore, and Lucy’s boss sternly enforces a no-contact rule. Naively, Lucy asks, “Did this happen to you?” and her boss answers matter-of-factly, “It’s bound to happen to every single matchmaker here. As for the women—dating involves risks.”

In an interview with TODAY, Song said that it would have felt incomplete to make a movie about modern dating without including the dangers of sexual violence:

“One in three women experience sexual assault in their life. So the idea that you have a story that is intended to really talk about love and dating, the way it feels in 2025, and to not include a story where there can be a violation of trust, violation of everything, a crime...It wouldn’t have felt honest to me…the truth is that the commodification and the objectification of each other relates to dehumanization. And Sophie says, ‘Well, I’m not merchandise. I’m a person.’”

Watching Adore’s crisis response, I immediately thought of Match Group, the corporation behind Hinge, Tinder, and OKCupid. The apps function as a marketplace not dissimilar to Adore, where people who sign up are both the users of the service and the products sold to other users.

Participating in the marketplace comes with inherent dangers. Some surveys estimate that up to a third of women users have experienced some form of sexual violence from these apps, leading lawmakers, victims’ advocates, and survivors to demand data and accountability from dating companies. According to an article in The 19th:

“...attacks facilitated by dating apps happened faster and were more violent than when the perpetrator met the victim through other means. They also found that perpetrators who use dating apps are more likely to target vulnerable people. Almost 60 percent of sexual assault survivors self-reported a mental illness.”

These corporations have refused to remove predators off the apps, putting users’ lives at risk.

Though Match Group knows that a fair number of their users will be sexually assaulted, they view that risk as an unfortunate inevitability for their user/products. Though the movie doesn’t mention the apps, it sheds light on the commodification and dehumanization of anyone who’s ever used a dating app through the more archaic lens of Adore.

But here’s where The Materialists takes a turn towards the unrealistic, and even flattens the stories of victims themselves. Lucy, unlike your typical employee at a company embroiled in a lawsuit, stalks Sophie and chases her down the New York streets in a trench coat fit. Lucy’s sorta-apology falls flat, and her client cusses her out, calling her a pimp. Then, Lucy goes on a misdirected misogynistic rampage. As my friend Mahal pointed out succinctly:

After Sophie is assaulted, Lucy becomes disillusioned… there’s a montage of her yelling at all her female clients, taking out all her rage about what that assaulter did to Sophie, on all of these women (notably, none of them men). And she doesn’t just tell them not to trust men – she goes so far as to say they’re not as worthy as they believe themselves to be, and therefore need to lower their expectations when it comes to dating.

Then, another sudden twist resembling a thriller-horror: Sophie is stalked and threatened by her assaulter. Out of all the people she could call, she phones Lucy for help, and Lucy rushes over to save Sophie.

Sophie, grateful for Lucy’s help, asks her if she’ll ever meet someone who loves her. “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to find love,” Lucy says in her naive worldview, reassuring Sophie that they’ll file a restraining order against the predator—never mind that judges can take months to grant restraining orders, never mind that some stalking cases turn violent, never mind that Lucy’s client will be spending the next phase of her life in terror. It’s a total moral redemption for Lucy, who gets to play the knight in shining armor and assuage her guilt.

The victim is flattened to an angry, hopeless, sad caricature of a woman—nothing more than the only plot device to advance Sophie’s minimal character development. As NPR host Aisha Harris said Pop Culture Happy Hour last week:

Sophie admonishes her for invading her privacy in an attempt to absolve her feelings of guilt. "I'm not merchandise!" she screams. "I'm a person…" If that scene had been the end of this plotline, I could understand Song's decision to include it as a way of acknowledging some of the harsh realities that come with turning dating into a business, even as it lies within the questionable narrative realm of rape-as-drama. But… Song takes it a step further by allowing Lucy to find redemption through Sophie.

Most confounding is the B-plot…which has its protagonist finding strength and emotional growth via a side character's suffering. It feels oddly cynical — again: This has been touted as a rom-com! — as a means of getting from point A (Lucy-as-icy-social climber) to point B (Lucy-as-hopeless-romantic).

Finally, Song chooses to shifts the movie from the thriller-horror back to bubbly rom-com where Lucy, without any further self-reflection about the ethics of her career or any contemplation on whether her chaotic ex is indeed the right person for her, gets her storybook ending outside the apartment where her client was just stalked.

As I watched the haphazard happy ending, I could not suspend the disbelief of Dakota Johnson, a 3rd-generation nepo baby, and Chris Evans, an Avenger with a net worth of $110 million, playing two working class New Yorkers with debt. Everything wraps up neatly with a bow, ending on a “love-conquers-all” message.

I walked out of the theater appreciative, truly, that Song brought up the societal commentary she did on modern-day dating: the horrors of sexual assault, racism/classism, and the fatal beauty standards around thinness and height. I’d much rather prefer a romance movie that addresses societal issues like The Materialists than one that doesn’t.

But I wasn’t convinced that the issues she surfaced, most notably sexual assault, were given the respect and proper treatment they deserve. Because of how prevalent sexual violence is in modern-day dating, Song could have done better than relegate sexual violence to a flat plot device.

As Song continues her own career ascent as a writer-director, I hope she keeps making films about romance—but with more depth and with less tropes than The Materialists.

*special thanks to all my friends for contributing their thoughts and opinions.
**all the lines I quote are not verbatim but from the best of my memory.