Love, and other bugs: Deepanjana Pal writes on Materialists

Hindustan Times

21-06-2025

I have a deep-seated aversion to AI-generated content. Even so, watching Chris Evans deliver his heroic monologue in Materialists (2025) made me wish there was a version of Celine Song's new film in which artificial intelligence had scrubbed Evans out and replaced him with Cary Grant. Or a young Shammi Kapoor. Or Gong Yoo (of Train to Busan). Or Richard Ayoade (of The IT Crowd). PREMIUM Even Pascal's crinkly-eyed smile can't plug the gaps. Materialists isn't nearly as heart-wrenching as writer-director Celine Song's last film, Past Lives (2023).
Evans is the petard on which Materialists hoists itself.
He plays John, the quintessential artist: short on money, but tall in every other way. He is a man of passion and sensitivity; a man who makes love seem easy. Unfortunately, when embodied by Evans, John has all the charm of melting vanilla ice-cream. He doesn't make one want to throw caution to the wind. Instead, he makes an excellent case for warily raising one's standards.
It doesn't help that Pedro Pascal plays John's counterpoint, a capitalist Prince Charming named Harry. He lives in a $12 million penthouse in New York, works at a private equity firm. But, most importantly, he has Pascal's crinkly-eyed smile and gift for turning vulnerability into a pheromone trigger.
One of the loveliest moments in the film is when Harry crouches to show what he'd look like if he was half a foot shorter, becoming smaller, sadder and more insecure with every lost inch.
At the apex of the love triangle is Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker who presents herself as an emotional calculator adept at cracking the math of romantic relationships, while also mournfully declaring early on: 'I'm going to die alone.' It's a line that makes everyone laugh, both in the film and outside it, because if someone as radiant as Lucy can't find love, well, what hope is there for any of us?
Yet, as Song shows us over the course of Materialists, for all her slaying and sashaying, Lucy is floundering. She keeps repeating how important it is to be practical when looking for a match, but it soon becomes clear that the person she's trying to convince, first and foremost, is herself.
Through the film, long-held conventions of gender and romance do little to empower either the men or the women. Meanwhile, even for those who appear to be thriving in the materialist world, marriage appears like the equivalent of a band-aid on a gaping wound: it can't heal the injury, but it can help cover it up.
Writer-director Song's boldest play in Materialists is her bid to redefine marriage as an act of romantic agency, wrenching it away from its history as an economic and social contract that commodifies women. In the film, marriage ends up being the most impractical of decisions, taken by two people because they simply can't help themselves. It marks a compromise, not with one's dreams but with societal expectations.
At the end of Materialists, Lucy 'settles' for a man whose greatest commendation is that he proposes to her with a ring fashioned out of a plucked flower. The 'loser' emerges as the prize catch. Or would have, if Evans hadn't played John so blandly that everything about him felt trite.
Materialists isn't as heart-wrenching as Song's 2023 hit, Past Lives (2023), but it is full of beauty and hope. Much like its key characters, it doesn't check all the boxes, but it does serve as an antidote to cynicism.
Song adamantly champions the idea that love at its sweetest and most impractical is a dream worth striving for. In a world full of grief and despair, its decision to celebrate unpretentious romance feels not just refreshing but like a necessary act of defiance.
(To reach Deepanjana Pal with feedback, write to @dpanjana on Instagram)