{"id":1960146,"date":"2025-08-14T15:04:40","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T15:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=1960146"},"modified":"2025-08-14T15:04:40","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T15:04:40","slug":"materialists-review-dakota-johnson-and-pedro-pascal-in-a-movie-that-cant-decide-if-its-a-romcom-a-farce-or-a-dark-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/materialists-review-dakota-johnson-and-pedro-pascal-in-a-movie-that-cant-decide-if-its-a-romcom-a-farce-or-a-dark-drama\/","title":{"rendered":"Materialists review \u2013 Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal in a movie that can\u2019t decide if it\u2019s a romcom, a farce, or a dark drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cI\u2019m asking here for the bare minimum,\u201d begs the most frustrated client of professional matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson<\/a>). \u201cI don\u2019t want to settle.\u201d Her bare minimum, by the way, is a salary of 150K or above, a height of six feet or above, and a full head of hair. Materialists, then, is a romcom made for late-stage capitalism<\/a>, populated by people who seek love like they\u2019re negotiating the Treaty of Versailles. If you don\u2019t think they\u2019re real (one man insists he\u2019ll only date a \u201c20 BMI\u201d or under), then you just haven\u2019t met them yet.<\/p>\n

Director Celine Song<\/a>, as in her debut Past Lives (2023), draws here from real experience. She worked briefly in the matchmaking field, and so takes a knowledgeable and dexterous approach to its operations. It\u2019s a film that works beautifully as an intellectual exercise. Ironically, it\u2019s in the love stuff where it starts to falter.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s tone has proven somewhat divisive with audiences and critics (it was released back in June in the US<\/a>). At times, it borders on farce, like when Lucy and a colleague feverishly discuss the benefits of height surgery, in which the bones are broken and forcibly separated (\u201csix inches can double a man\u2019s value on the market!\u201d). Then, suddenly, a client commits a horrific act, and the film tumbles down a ravine of fear and uncertainty.<\/p>\n

But isn\u2019t that exactly what dating feels like now? A sometimes funny, petty, absurd, cruel, and dangerous pursuit, where the whittling down of a person to algorithmic data becomes yet another symptom of the capitalist disease. You could play a disastrously messy drinking game by taking a shot any time someone is referred to in terms of their \u201cvalue\u201d, or someone admits they\u2019re only in a relationship because it makes them feel \u201cvaluable\u201d.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s how Lucy calms down a bride with the jitters (her soon-to-be-husband makes her sister jealous), and how she initially describes her attraction to Harry: a man who is wealthy and tall and conveniently played by current go-to Hollywood hunk<\/a>, Pedro Pascal. He is, in her words, \u201ca unicorn\u201d. The actor plays him with the kind of boundless graciousness that\u2019s made him so popular off screen. He shakes hands with every guest at a party and turns up to a date with an entire planter of roses.<\/p>\n

\"Dakota<\/span><\/div>\n

Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal in \u2018Materialists\u2019 (A24)<\/p>\n

And yet, the inevitable point of Materialists is that the maths don\u2019t hold up in the face of Lucy\u2019s ex, John (Chris Evans). He\u2019s a struggling actor who\u2019s lived in the same crusty flat for over a decade, with roommates who leave used condoms on the kitchen floor. That a woman might abandon the smart and comfortable for the reckless, instinctual pursuit of love is the bread-and-butter of the romcom. And yet it\u2019s a formula that requires chemistry like we do oxygen, and Johnson and Evans don\u2019t click in the same way as, say, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams in The Notebook.<\/p>\n

They fit their roles fine: her cool girl languor has always been appealing, and he\u2019s the textbook charismatic grouch. But when Song made her heroine in Past Lives \u2013 Greta Lee\u2019s Nora \u2013 a relative enigma, it suited the character\u2019s tumultuous sense of identity. Here it just makes it hard to understand what Lucy and John actually talk about outside of money and relationships. Disappointingly, Materialists trusts that we\u2019ll simply do the maths and all come up with the same answer.<\/p>\n

Dir: Celine Song. Starring: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zo\u00eb Winters, Marin Ireland. Cert 15, 117 minutes.<\/p>\n

\u2018Materialists\u2019 is in cinemas<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ca.style.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI\u2019m asking here for the bare minimum,\u201d begs the most frustrated client of professional matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson). \u201cI don\u2019t want to settle.\u201d Her bare minimum, by the way, is a salary of 150K or above, a height of six feet or above, and a full head of hair. Materialists, then, is a romcom made […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1960147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[344873,344876,23954,344342,344874,310573,344875],"class_list":["post-1960146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-bare-minimum","tag-celine-song","tag-dakota-johnson","tag-materialists","tag-past-lives","tag-pedro-pascal","tag-professional-matchmaker"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Materialists-review-\u2013-Dakota-Johnson-and-Pedro-Pascal-in-a.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1960146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1960147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1960146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1960146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1960146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}