The False Choice In Materialists

Celine Song’s Materialists arrives wrapped like a gift-box rom-com. It’s got glossy New York streets, glossy people, and that glossy conflict at the heart of the genre: a woman torn between two men. Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson), a successful matchmaker who can orchestrate everyone else’s love stories but not her own, must choose between Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), a Wall Street financier with infinite resources, and John Finch (Chris Evans), her ex-boyfriend with artistic dreams and a life that runs on survival jobs.

At first glance, it’s a familiar dilemma. The rich guy who can provide everything except intimacy. The struggling but soulful guy who may never provide anything but intimacy. Many have dissed the film as "broke man propaganda". Others have blamed Lucy's own conditioning for the ultimate choice she makes. Song has vigorously countered and expressed concern that so many people could not relate to Lucy's "poor" choice. In one of her interviews she argues: it's as if people believe that poor men don't deserve love, as if someone is poor because of their own follies and not by the very design of the world. To my mind the film does not really position itself as a political or economic narrative of love and marital choices. It tries to instead build itself on a comical evolutionary scaffolding where women are geared to choose the man with the resources. In Lucy's mind the "math is simple". Marriage happens when a couple is matched by their attractiveness and upbringing. She definitely wants a rich husband.

But in modern context, this binary itself is misplaced. For women, the choice is not between the rich man and the poor man. The choice is between freedom and bondage.

What freedom means, however, is not a universal script. For some women, freedom could indeed be material comfort: the absence of financial anxiety, the ability to raise children without worrying about rent, a private corner in a city that otherwise grinds you down. For others, freedom is refusing to orbit their lives around a man at all, whether rich or poor. It’s choosing work, solitude, friendships, or even a series of short-lived flings that don’t require permanent negotiation.
This is where Materialists glitters but doesn’t quite burn. Song shows us the cruelty of modern dating culture, the endless swipes, the commodification of intimacy, the way we assess human beings like assets in a portfolio. She captures the wound we all feel: that dating today is less about connection than about transactions, resumes, and ROI. But she doesn’t go far enough. She doesn’t puncture the institution of marriage itself, which, for centuries, has functioned less as a romance plot than as a contract. And contracts, historically, have not been written for women’s freedom.
So when Lucy sits there, torn between the financier and the actor, the question isn’t: who will she marry? It’s: why marry at all?

That is the silence at the heart of the film. It’s a silence that reflects the paralysis of our times. The modern woman is pulled in two directions. On the one hand, marriage still sparkles in our cultural imagination. It’s aspirational, a marker of adulthood, a social badge. Even fiercely independent women will sometimes confess, late at night over wine, that they want a wedding. Maybe not the husband, certainly not the patriarchy, but the wedding. Social recognition. The ritual of being seen.
On the other hand, the lived reality of marriage for many women remains tethered to compromise, to unpaid labor, to invisibility. A wealthy husband may cushion those blows with money, but the cushion is still wrapped around a cage. A broke artist-husband may not cage you with control, but poverty itself can become a prison. In both cases, freedom is negotiated, not granted.
Lucy, like many of us, is caught in that ambivalence. And Song, perhaps knowingly, leaves her there. Which is both the strength and the limitation of the film. It tells us what we already know: dating is cruel, marriage is complicated, and love is no longer the easy fairy tale. But it does not imagine what lies beyond.

What might that beyond look like? For some, it might mean not marrying at all, building chosen families, or investing in selfhood rather than couplehood. For others, it might mean remaking marriage itself into a partnership of equals, stripped of its economic and patriarchal trappings. The truth is, there is no singular “modern woman’s desire.” There are only women, plural, inventing their own meanings of freedom, often against the grain of culture and cinema alike.

And perhaps that’s the real story Materialists doesn’t tell: that the most radical act for Lucy would not be choosing between Harry or John. It would be choosing Lucy.

(The writer is a mental health and behavioural sciences columnist, conducts art therapy workshops and provides personality development sessions for young adults. She can be found @the_millennial_pilgrim on Instagram and Twitter)