Like clockwork, every year in recent memory has demanded its own "deconstruction of the conventional rom-com" or "callback to the Hollywood formula" with a new and modern spin. Whether that's the heartfelt intercultural illness story underpinning 2017's The Big Sick, the flashy Singapore backdrops of 2018's Crazy Rich Asians, the goofy sex comedy of 2023's No Hard Feelings, or the same year's cross-pond gay romance Red, White, and Royal Blue, one or two films are annually anointed to be the "fresh take" on romance for the day and age. 

Unfortunately, for 2025, that mantel appears to have been placed on the unpleasant and shallow Materialists, the sophomore film from Past Lives (2023) director Celine Song. The movie's pretense, of course, is that dating today is itself unpleasant and shallow, with the rise of swiping on apps, obsessing over social media, and demanding "quiet luxury" — so a film about it should mirror reality. Even if that's true, Song fails at making a rom-com that is either romantic or comedic, thanks primarily to its cardboard, chemistry-less leads.

Dakota Johnson's sultry monotone is in full force as Lucy Mason, a matchmaker in New York City. Although Lucy spins yarns for clients about true love and real happiness, she herself plans to either marry wealthy or die alone. Her obsession with wealth is all-consuming, especially as her five-figure salary doesn't cut it in the Big Apple for her dreams of opulence. That tension was at the heart of her breakup with long-time boyfriend John, a struggling actor; although they were supposedly in love, their mutual lower-middle-class status drove a wedge between them. 

So it's convenient when Lucy meets the dashingly handsome and exorbitantly wealthy Harry at a wedding of one of her clients. Harry, played with devil-may-care rich tuxedoed bachelor energy by Pedro Pascal, is immediately smitten by Lucy and wines and dines her across the city. Too bad that Lucy is nominally still thinking about John, especially after she ran into him at the very same wedding; his winning smile and muscled t-shirt workman strength, courtesy of Chris Evans, still play in her mind. Two men, one woman. Who will she choose?

Turns out it hardly matters, because no one on screen seems to really care. Harry's admiration for Lucy is clear, but in a sexless upper-crust way that will be transparently over fast. John claims to have never gotten over Lucy, but seems shruggingly resigned to both his lot in life and their awkward relationship as exes. And for her part, Lucy doesn't obviously click with either; Johnson's blasé line reads are icy and robotic, and even when she tells the men she loves them the passion never reaches her eyes.

Characterization has never been Celine Song's strong suit; in Past Lives, she was interested more in ideas of immigration, language barriers, and love lost and regained than in the people who were vehicles for those ideas. Luckily, those concepts were still worth exploring. In Materialists, meanwhile, Song's script casts characters aside to try once again to deal with "big themes," but this time those themes are both more boring to begin with and handled in a more surface-level manner. For example, to get at the titular materialism, the script is overstuffed with jokes about how much height and money matter to women, and while there is research about their importance (especially in the surface-level world of New York, where 1 in 24 people are millionaires), the bit gets repetitive — and unconvincing — quickly. Similarly, although Song wants to talk about wealth and class and their roles in finding love, the central conflict between the two men is tied up too quickly to engage meatily with what they each stand for. And most damningly, Materialists introduces a clunky sexual assault subplot which, instead of carefully positioning the real challenges that women face dating in a big anonymous city, just makes everyone involved look bad and childish.

If Materialists fails comedically and thematically, it's even worse on the romantic front. Lucy's cruelty to John fosters no sparks, and is so pervasive that it's impossible to feel that she's doing anything but settling by choosing him. Meanwhile, Harry is a cute side character but never reaches the leading man status Pascal deserves. And when the two men meet in a bar, a scene in that should be fraught with sexual tension and male competition simply fizzles. 

A couple aspects of the film work, like the beautiful production design and set decoration from Anthony Gasparro and Amy Beth Silver, respectively, each working with the best that Manhattan and Brooklyn have to offer. Attention to detail within Harry's apartment, for example, develops him as a character far more than his wooden dialogue, as does the chic corporatism of the matchmaking office space for its employees. 

But ultimately, Song's second outing takes the shortcomings of her first and blows them up even bigger. Audiences would be far better off turning on a Hitch rerun and calling it a night.