By Maisie Corkhill
Celine Song’s second film, Materialists (A24, 2025), has been met with mixed reviews. The concept is simple (spoilers ahead): an independent woman passes over a rich suitor for her poor past love. This – highly literary – trope is as old as time: why do so many people hate it here?
Marketed (or regrettably, mismarketed) as the revival of the rom-com, Materialists is instead tonally closer to Song’s debut film Past Lives (A24, 2023), sharing its introspective and melancholic gaze, but hardening in its critique of capitalism’s grip over modern-day relationships. Where Past Lives explores the disjunction of a childhood love reemerging against the reality of adult responsibility, Materialists utilises a classic love-triangle to interrogate ideas of class, wealth and romance.
Song has put a lot of herself in this film. Talking openly about her own six-month stint as a matchmaker in New York, Song said she learnt “more about [people] than their therapists because they were willing to tell me their hearts’ desires in a way that was so frank and objective”. This insight is carried over and magnified in Lucy, a matchmaker who assesses her clients (and herself) based on their stock value on the dating market: made up of background, income, education and intelligence, looks, age, height.
To me, Song’s vision for Materialists is crystal clear, and executed almost seamlessly. The overriding question is value. It confronts how we cannot help but assign value to people, so that Lucy’s client has to remind her (and us), “I’m not merchandise. I’m a person”. It is surprising how much has changed since Song’s own turn as a matchmaker in the 2010s. While relationships have always been viewed through numbers, our generation is among the first to be sold cosmetic surgery as a means of increasing your value on the market. Mainstream body modifications, like preventative botox, and more outlandish procedures like the cosmetic height surgery mentioned in the film (available since before 2020) are marketed as a shrewd investment in your future – if you can afford it. Our era yearns for a storyteller like Song to question whether there may still be something authentic that survives at this stage of human relationships under capitalism.
To ask this question, Song has turned to classic love stories from film history, building a “syllabus” that A24 published on their social channels. This collection forms a strong artillery in Song’s fight against the transactional relationships of today. Many are literary adaptations, and bring weight to the core triangle at the heart of Materialists.
Harry or John, rich or poor, head or heart: this is Lucy’s decision, and one that many literary heroines have made before her. One of these heroines is Bathsheba Everdene of Far From the Madding Crowd (2015, dir. Thomas Vinterberg). These two stories can be mapped almost seamlessly on each other: a poor heroine rejects her first love – her circumstances improve – she is courted by a rich, older man who offers her security – she examines her ideals and returns to her first love.
The casting of these two films, however, exposes the weak spot in Materialists. Where Michael Sheen is plausible as the rejected suitor Boldwood, Pedro Pascal’s casting as Harry seems to have caused some hermeneutic friction. Pascal the actor is not badly cast; but Pascal as the self-proclaimed “daddy” of the internet and the subject of “thirst-trap” edits on TikTok, has caused many chronically-online viewers to root for him in a way that they wouldn’t for Michael Sheen’s Boldwood, despite their characters being materially the same.
Pascal’s casting has fuelled a number of bitter one-line reviews on the film-logging app Letterboxd, with one viewer saying ‘okay but am i really supposed to be torn between billionaire pedro pascal and broke not-pedro pascal?? in this economy?’. In a way then, Pascal’s casting is quite clever, because it has caused some viewers to fall into the trap that the film itself has set out to interrogate: we may ‘value’ Harry because he’s rich, and ‘value’ Pascal because he is attractive and popular, but does that make him the right choice for Lucy? And does it have anything to do with love?
The other camp of negative reviewers focus on John’s economic status, dubbing the film ‘broke man propaganda’. Part of the point of Letterboxd is to make reviews quippy and funny, but such a charged movement to take down John’s character specifically because he is poor reveals something deeper and darker. Song has said in an interview that she was ‘upset’ and ‘concerned’ at these reviews, and by extension, the way we talk about poor people.
In another of the film’s inspirations, Emma (2020, dir. Autumn de Wilde), is a particularly insidious scene when Mr. Elton rejects Harriet Smith as a marital match. In some equally brilliant screenwriting, he almost spits at Emma that ‘everyone has their level’. While he will politely socialise with Harriet to get close to Emma, he cannot view her as a potential partner because she is poor. Market logic frames wealth as inherent value and poverty as inherent worthlessness, an idea that de Wilde critiques in this scene from Emma. But in these ‘broke man propaganda’ reviews of Materialists, we see a cruel language of exclusion instead being used against art. If we root for Lucy to abandon John because he is poor, and choose someone ‘on her level’, are we really any better than Mr. Elton?
Song’s “syllabus” places Materialists firmly within the cinema of true romance. This brings me to a film that isn’t on Song’s list, but could be. From the opening scene of Materialists, where two prehistoric people pledge themselves to one another with a flower ring, I could not help but think of the 2002 Count of Monte Cristo (dir. Kevin Reynolds). Early in this film the two lovers, Edmond and Mercédès (also sitting in a cave) pledge themselves by winding twine from a blanket around her wedding finger.
Almost identical scenes bookend Materialists, with John fashioning a flower ring for Lucy in the park at the end of the film. Sentimental? Perhaps. But for me, this is high romance. Both pledges are deliberately – delightfully – ephemeral: as privately exchanged tokens, they eschew the language of dowries and contracts. They represent promises that need not be validated by the market, of the self-sustaining love that endures regardless of the carat-content of a ring. It seems like this kind of connection is becoming less of a priority in relationships today. But if Song encourages anything in Materialists, it is to confront the prejudices of our inherently cynical age and rediscover the magic of rooting for the love match.
References
Celine Song interview with Time Magazine. https://time.com/7282305/celine-song-materialists-interview/
Celine Song’s “syllabus” via A24 on instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/DKz_yIQxa_P/
Celine Song’s discussing ‘broke man propaganda’ reviews with Refinery29 via TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@refinery29/video/7536286483540610335?lang=en
Bluestocking Oxford 