Celine Song’s The Materialists wants to interrogate how love, money, and modern dating collide. On paper, it has the makings of a dream project: an A24 film directed by the woman behind Past Lives, starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal in a tangled love triangle about status and desire. But the result is surprisingly underwhelming, beautifully shot, occasionally thought-provoking, yet emotionally inert. The only thing that kept me invested was Pedro Pascal, whose quiet charisma almost tricks you into thinking the film has more chemistry than it actually does.
Pascal plays Harry, a wealthy, self-assured private equity investor who’s described early on as a “unicorn” in the dating world – kind, rich, tall, and emotionally available. He’s one of two love interests competing for Lucy (Johnson), a sharp but emotionally opaque matchmaker who broke up with her longtime boyfriend (Evans, playing a broke actor with too many roommates) because he was content with being poor. Harry offers Lucy everything she claims to want: stability, safety, the kind of life that includes spontaneous Iceland vacations and designer gifts. But none of it seems to matter when the film abruptly steers her back toward Evans’s character, a man who routinely makes her feel guilty for wanting more.
One of the few refreshing choices the film makes is in how it presents Harry. Unlike so many films that reduce Latino characters to immigrant trauma narratives or hyper-masculine clichés, The Materialists casts Pedro Pascal, a Chilean-American actor, as a man who was born into wealth and moves through the world with elegance, generosity, and control. It’s rare to see a Latino lead play this type of character, one who isn’t defined by hardship or hustle, but simply exists at the top of the socioeconomic ladder. That makes it even more frustrating when the film sidelines him.
In the most buzzed-about moment, Harry reveals he got leg-lengthening surgery to go from 5’4” to over six feet tall. It should be a shocking commentary on what we demand from men to meet conventional standards. Instead, it lands flat. Lucy barely reacts. And so the movie’s most potentially interesting metaphor (how literally reshaping yourself to be desirable can feel like both liberation and performance) gets buried. The movie gestures at modern dating anxieties without ever really holding them.
Pascal, meanwhile, sells every scene he’s in. The date sequences between Harry and Lucy, though emotionally stiff, are gorgeously shot and give off the uncanny feeling of actually being on a date with him. I found myself kicking my feet, giggling, and fully buying into the idea of him as a catch. But while the cinematography is lush, the writing leaves nothing to build on. Lucy and Harry have no inside jokes, no warmth, no spark. The same goes for her relationship with Evans’s character, which is somehow even less romantic. There’s no tension, no flirtation, and no sense of why these people are drawn to each other beyond narrative convenience.
Midway through the film, a subplot involving one of Lucy’s clients being accused of sexual assault drops in without warning. It’s clearly meant to serve as a turning point, something that forces Lucy to re-evaluate her values and eventually drives her back to Evans. But it’s handled so clumsily that it feels exploitative. Instead of deepening the story’s emotional realism, it works as a shortcut to shame Lucy out of her material expectations and shepherd her toward the romance the screenplay deems purer.
By the end of the film, Lucy quits her job in a decision that feels deeply tied to her relationship with Jack (Evans), even if the movie never says it outright. Earlier, she was offered a major promotion and a significant pay raise from her $80K salary, but turned it down in favor of… what exactly? The man who once mocked her for liking nice things? The same man who’s still broke, still living in an apartment that is falling apart, and still views ambition as a moral flaw? It’s a baffling move, especially in a story so fixated on money. One of the first questions Lucy asks Harry (Pascal) is how much he makes. Financial security is not just a subplot, it’s the main plot. That her arc ends with rejecting upward mobility in both her love life and career feels less like growth and more like surrender dressed up as romance.
Plus, Lucy is judged more harshly than the men around her. Her desire for material comfort is framed as shallow, while Jack’s lack of ambition is forgiven as authenticity. The film claims to be about realism, but the real world doesn’t reward women for giving up everything in the name of love. It punishes them. And so, unintentionally or not, The Materialists reinforces the very gender dynamics it claims to examine.
What’s especially disheartening is that this could’ve been a far more radical story. Song had a chance to show that women don’t have to choose between love and financial security – that you can, and should, have both. But instead of imagining a future where mutual care and stability coexist, The Materialists makes Lucy settle for less.
Harry isn’t there for comic relief, or coded danger, or backstory tragedy. He’s just a rich, kind, fully formed man of status and poise. That portrayal alone could’ve been a powerful counter to the narrow scripts often handed to Latino men in Hollywood. But instead of exploring that dynamic, The Materialists lets it slip through its fingers. Harry becomes not a challenge or a partner, but a symbol of everything Lucy is told she must give up to prove her capacity for “real” love.
Pedro Pascal was ready to give her everything. And for once, the fantasy didn’t feel so far-fetched. It just didn’t stand a chance in a film that refused to believe she deserved it.
