Celine Song’s Past Lives was the ultimate tearjerker of 2023 for me, so I was waiting with bated breath to see how she’d follow up. Her sophomore feature film Materialists is just as charming, a little sillier, and one of the most beautiful casts you’ll see in a film this summer. Materialists in many ways mimics the classic 90s and early 2000s rom coms. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a mid-30s matchmaker who, while excelling at helping others find their soul mates (or business partners-in-life) isn’t as lucky when it comes to finding love for herself.

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Lucy meets all sorts of characters in her line of work, and we get to see many of them. There’s the 40-something man looking to settle down with a more mature girl (around 27 years old or so) and the 39-year-old who, despite her best efforts and there being absolutely nothing “wrong” with her, can’t seem to find the elusive man of her dreams. But Lucy doesn’t give up, and her tenacity has earned her notoriety as one of the company’s best matchmakers. 

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She meets Harry (Pedro Pascal) at her client’s wedding, and he’s everything a girl could possibly dream of. A “unicorn,” she calls him, reciting his laundry list of incredible qualities that make him seem almost too good to be true. A bit tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, since people everywhere describe Pedro himself in the same way. Like many women, Lucy doesn’t see the value in herself and can’t understand why any man would want to be with her. Because of that, when Harry pursues her, she tries in vain to dissuade him. In fact, there is more than one occasion in the film where Lucy tries to talk men out of loving her. But in classic romcom fashion, true love always wins. A run-in with her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans) seems to prove the invisible string theory has legs, even in the great big bustling city of New York.

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Materialists isn’t about who ends up with whom. It’s more about Lucy’s emotional journey and finding her own self-worth separate from romantic relationships. Her life and her work are commingled to a fault. Her job reduces every romantic prospect down to a numbers game; which match is most likely to succeed based on age/height/fertility/income disparity? It’s no wonder the idea of love has lost its luster. As a romance cynic who often rolls her eyes at these types of films, even I fell for Materialists’ charms. It’s a great movie for a date, or a solo cinema-outing to remind yourself that you are your own greatest love.