Materialists is an Abysmal, Embarrassing Disgrace of a Movie. Why Do Professional Film Critics Love It So Much?

"Sparkling, smart and sophisticated — finally, a rom-com for intelligent adults." - 🤡

Last week, as part of the promotional campaign for Materialists, the second feature from writer-director Celine Song, the film’s production and distribution company, A24, posted a shocking and disturbing image to its official Instagram page.

The image was a screenshot of an email sent to A24 by Song, who, presumably at the behest of a well-intentioned marketing intern, had compiled what the accompanying caption described as a “Materialists movie syllabus” of influences, references, and “movie about similar job as matchmakers [sic].” Song’s syllabus featured many of the consensus-best romantic dramedies from recent cinema history, including The Graduate and “Jerry McGuire [sic],” and to anybody who hadn’t yet seen Materialists, the list would have read as competent and innocuous, providing an adequate (if somewhat low-effort) overview of the movie’s apparent genre.

But for anyone who had previously experienced the vital, well-calibrated, medium-specific pleasures of films like Broadcast News and The Age of Innocence, then somehow managed to sit through Materialists without suffering a nervous breakdown, Song’s syllabus would have assumed an altogether different, much more ominous character. What would otherwise be a forgettable piece of digital advertising ephemera mutates into a kind of apocryphal document, a text frightening in its public display of cognitive dissonance, strident pomposity, and casual derangement. That’s because Materialists, by every known measure of artistic merit, is the perfect soul-crushing opposite of every film that Song claims inspired and shaped it. Her movie resembles the greatness of those classics no more than a haircut resembles a decapitation.

Tomorrow, the editors of this newsletter could rename it The Worst Movie Substack, dedicate themselves to publishing a negative review of Materialists seven days a week, 365 days a year, and there would still be fresh material left to cover in 2030. Few major releases this century can match Materialists’s potent blend of confounding screenwriting choices, suffocating dramatic inertia, indistinct one-note characters, and so-proud-of-itself pseudo-profundity. Even someone who’d never watched a movie before in their life, but was nevertheless familiar with how humans generally think, speak, act, work, fuck, date, and marry would have little trouble identifying the flaws and off-notes in Materialists. Forget people: An empty movie theater recliner could sense that something not quite right was transpiring on the screen.

It only stands to reason, then, that professional film critics are just smitten with the movie. In her review for the New York Times, Manohla Dargis describes Materialists as a “seductive, smartly refreshed addition to an impossibly, perhaps irredeemably old-fashioned genre that was once a Hollywood staple.” At RogerEbert.com, Christy Lemire awarded Song’s “soulful” film three-and-a-half stars out of a possible four, writing that compared to other interventions in the rom-com genre Materialists is “very much its own thing: sharper and spikier, brutally honest and bracingly contemporary in its depiction of dating in 21st-century Manhattan.” Newsweek: “Sparkling, smart and sophisticated.” Variety: “It’s a sharp and serious social romantic drama full of telling observations about the way we live now.” The vegan lady on Letterboxd? Five stars.

Maybe these critics were impressed by Materialists’s audacious curveball of a cold open, in which a caveman presents his cave-girlfriend with a set of crude tools before sliding an engagement flower-ring onto her finger—you know, because there has been a material aspect to attraction, romance, and matrimony since time immemorial. Perhaps they appreciated how this trite unoriginal insight informs the movie’s contemporary love-triangle conceit, in which a millionaire financier (Pedro Pascal) and a struggling actor (Chris Evans) vie for the hand of Lucy, a cynical, data-pilled matchmaker (Dakota Johnson). Lucy is a woman with whom both men enjoy a total absence of chemistry—conversational, physical, intellectual, sexual—and zero shared interests. The love triangle, and the partnership that eventually emerges from it, could not be more loveless, unearned, or contrived. Is that what resonated with critics?

What about how each member of the loveless love triangle mostly occupies their own poorly made student film, or how they share almost no tension-creating on-screen time together as a trio? Instead, Song chooses to concentrate almost entirely on a series of endless, silence-clogged, barely lit dinners between the financier and Lucy, whose expertise in matchmaking amounts to sounding like a broken wind-up toy that squeals MONEY MONEY MONEY every time its string gets yanked. In fact, Song’s over-simplified cudgel of a thesis may be the only consistent element of Materialists, whose tone and pacing and direction rarely feel in control. Every scene is all over the place, while somehow simultaneously being stuck in the mud. Then there’s the sexual assault and the leg-lengthening surgery.

If critics were still on the fence about Materialists before one of Lucy’s clients gets sexually assaulted, before Pedro Pascal’s financier admits to undergoing leg-lengthening surgery, the inclusion of these laughably bungling subplots must have won them over. These are precisely the vestigial parts of an early screenplay draft that a good editor convinces a fledging screenwriter to cut: beyond random, at once too serious and offensively silly, the product of the writer reading one viral GQ article and forcing its content into their story for cheap topicality.

Worst of all, Song makes the victim of the sexual assault, Sophie, so shallow and unsympathetic that it’s hard to discern whether or not the audience should be upset that she has been sexually assaulted…which is…feminism? Either way, would Sophie blame her matchmaker? And would the matchmaker check her notes about the perpetrator, as if she would have written down rapist? and forgotten about it? Have 5’6” men not been getting laid in the Mediterranean, Latin America, and Asia since the dawn of civilization? Are men shorter than that not getting laid every single day in the United States in 2025?

They have, they are, but acknowledging that irrefutable reality would require the basic social fluency and commonsense thinking that Materialists disregards on both sides of the camera—not that there will be any consequences for these failures, or for the inability of critics to identify and critique them. Ultimately, this shoddy artistry, autopilot writing, and overall thoughtlessness may be what most resonated with critics. None of them will lose their job for saying that Materialists is excellent, mediocre, or subpar, even though it’s magnitudes worse than all those evaluations, even though their vocation is determining whether a movie is good or bad. Like these inept critics, Celine Song, buoyed by their acclaim and industry support, will not want for opportunities going forward. To quote an age-old bit of matchmaking wisdom: like attracts like. It must be nice to know you’re not alone in being terrible at your job.