Materialists Review: A24's Love Triangle Movie Isn't The Rom-Com You'd Expect

A24 has a reputation for making misleading trailers for its horror movies, selling edgy, outré filmmaking in ways that appear to fit more traditional modes. Now it's rom-com fans' turn to get the old bait-and-switch: where every piece of advertising for "Materialists" has sold it as a throwback to classic romantic comedies of the '90s, Celine Song's follow-up to "Past Lives" is using the aesthetics of the rom-com for the sake of something pricklier. Much of "Materialists" is almost aggressively unromantic, and while it's not without laughs, those are also darker and more uncomfortable than you'd expect.

So what is "Materialists," if it's only sort of a romance and sort of a comedy? Mainly, it's a social commentary on the business of dating, the way individuals are commodified and reduced down to a statistics, and the violence this reductive perspective brings about. Its central character, the "voluntary celibate" high-end matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson), doesn't believe in love and considers her profession a matter of economics. Back when she was a struggling actress, Lucy used to have a boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), but she broke up with him because he was poor. In one of the film's few moments of classic rom-com cheese, she has a chance reunion with John — now a part-time waiter and still a struggling actor — at the same wedding where she attracts the attention of Harry (Pedro Pascal), a suave venture capitalist who, by her own matchmaking standards, seems too perfect to have any reason to date her.

Lucy's matchmaking emphasizes the same data points over and over again: height, weight, age, income, politics, taste, attractiveness, and general "value." When the bride at a wedding Lucy helped arrange has doubts on the big day, Lucy assures her not to worry about love and instead determine the "value" behind said marriage, even if the "value" is just to make her sister jealous. This mercenary economic perspective is a depressing one, and one challenged by both Harry's appeals to Lucy's "intangible" assets and by the fact she still thinks about John — who, to be clear, is still an extremely attractive man who'd rank high on most of her data points, but whose finances and living situation would seem disqualifying. The film's funniest satirical sequences showcase Lucy's interviews with clients of assorted levels of vapidity, which escalate in absurdity as Lucy grows to question what she's doing with her life.

Those familiar with Dakota Johnson only from the "Fifty Shades of Grey" movies and "Madame Web" often dismiss her as a "bad" actress, but that's not fair. Her performance in "Materialists" demonstrates that she's great in the right role. The same sense of detachment that becomes a joke when talking about spiders in the Amazon is perfectly applied when playing a character who's meant to be shallow and uncomfortable, and when Lucy gets overwhelmed with regret for her bad choices, that's when Johnson demonstrates her skill at depicting depression the way she's done in films like "Cha Cha Real Smooth" and "The Lost Daughter."

Pedro Pascal, having no such doubts to overcome from the mainstream audience, gives yet another ultra-charismatic performance as the seemingly perfect "unicorn" of a boyfriend. The movie takes its sweet time before showing any significant flaw or insecurity on Harry's part, and when it does make such a reveal, Celine Song's screenplay has already done the elegant work of setting up the moment so it's handled with thorough sensitivity. As for Chris Evans, it's great to see him doing more human-scale acting instead of more "Red One"-style franchise-bait, and the former Captain America imbues John with a strong likability, but the character never quite grows beyond mere archetype.

There are various bits of oddness to note throughout "Materialists." There's the surprising opening scene depicting the first engagement between two cavepeople hundreds of thousands of years ago; possible "2001: A Space Odyssey" influence? The film's self-referentiality also stands out: John's big performance is in a production of one of Celine Song's own plays, "Tom and Eliza," and the big tell for how long ago a flashback scene takes place is a billboard for another A24 film, "Eighth Grade." Another thing that stood out, in a more negative way: the presence of Dasha Nekrasova playing one of Lucy's co-workers at the Adore matchmaking company (I wish I didn't recognize that name and for your sake, I sincerely hope you don't).

There are also major plot points I don't quite know what to make of. The film's darkest subplot, where one of Lucy's matches goes as wrong as you can imagine, is destined to be divisive. It's important for the overall message, and undeniably emotionally effective — the shot where Lucy is processing her grave mistake in the foreground while her coworkers are celebrating another match through the windows behind her might be the film's strongest composition — but I'm also not sure how realistic it is that someone in Lucy's position had never before considered the possibility of such a thing happening.

On the opposite side of the tonal spectrum, when "Materialists" does eventually seek out a rom-com happy ending, the movie threatens to fall apart. I get why Song would consider it the "right" ending on paper, but where I felt all the film's sadness, Lucy's turn toward romance in the end didn't feel convincing. It doesn't help the chemistry that one pivotal scene building to this turn looks like the two central stars shot most of it on separate greenscreens. There's one moment where I almost thought the movie was going to go a different route to a happy ending — I'm not sure if said different route would even be "good," but I am thinking about it. "Materialists" never reaches the passion and beauty of Song's debut romantic feature "Past Lives," but it's at its most interesting and insightful when it isn't even trying to.

"Materialists" opens in theaters on June 13.