Spoilers for Materialists (2025)

Do not be fooled by this film’s dreamy love triangle. Materialists is not the romantic comedy (rom-com) you thought it was going to be. In fact, it’s not a rom-com at all.

Dakota Johnson plays cynical matchmaker Lucy Mason, who works for the high-end matchmaking company Adore. Her job is to engineer love based on quantifiable traits; height, background, attractiveness, interests, and, most tellingly, income. Lucy has built a career around compatibility formulas and emotional distance, convincing herself that love can be reduced to data.

At the seventh wedding she’s successfully arranged, Lucy meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), the effortlessly charming and incredibly wealthy brother of the groom. She’s drawn to his polish and power, even if she’s not sure there’s anything real beneath it. Then, as if to test her cynicism, she runs into her ex, John (Chris Evans), who’s working the wedding as part of the catering staff. Compared to Harry, John is a reminder of everything Lucy’s tried to leave behind — instability, chaos, and the kind of connection that can’t be measured on a spreadsheet.

The film follows Lucy as she wrestles with her own contradictions, the desire for security versus the longing for something authentic. Through her encounters with Harry and John, she’s forced to question whether love is something you can curate, or something that happens despite your best attempts to control it. Materialists uses Lucy’s romantic entanglements as a mirror for modern relationships, asking whether we’re all just consumers in the marketplace of love, or if there’s still room for something real beneath the surface.

Romance films usually fall into one of two categories: they’re hilarious and sad (13 Going on 30, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and My Best Friend’s Wedding), or they’re just sad (The Notebook, Past Lives, and Me Before You). Materialists manages to include both themes but centers itself around neither comedy nor tear-jerking moments. Instead, it focuses on what you would expect a romance film to be about — but somehow rarely is: love itself.

At the end of the film, Lucy says out loud what the viewer has sensed the whole time. She is not in love with Harry; she is simply charmed by his money. Despite the two being a “perfect match,” she cannot stay with him. So Lucy picks her ex-boyfriend John, who by the standards illustrated in the film is a terrible match for her. But she loves him.

Yet, even though Lucy chooses “love,” the film refuses to let us off that easily. The viewer is not meant to leave with the cliche and perhaps naive impression that “love was the answer all along.” The last shot features Lucy and John eating out of to-go boxes from a cart in Central Park, something Lucy claimed in a previous scene, while breaking up with John, that she would never want to do for her anniversary. Lucy doesn’t seem completely satisfied with her decision, and that’s exactly the point. There was no “right” choice.

With this ending, the film manages to laugh at its own cynicism while reminding the audience to fight the urge to romanticize Lucy’s life. Lucy did not get her “perfect ending.” She made a choice, and as choices tend to do, it came with consequences. But here’s what matters: Lucy knows this. She understands that she has given up comfort in the pursuit of something authentic and has decided that the tradeoff is worth it, however uncomfortable it may be.

That’s what the film does so well. It refuses to answer the question of whether “love conquers all” and instead asks: in love there is sacrifice — is that sacrifice worth it? The brilliance of Materialists is that it doesn’t presume to know the answer for us. It simply shows us Lucy sitting in that park, choosing discomfort over numbness, mess over sterility, and leaves us to wonder what we would do in her place.

In refusing to give us a satisfying ending in the way of fulfilling all of Lucy’s hopes and dreams, the film gives us something more valuable: the truth. Love is messy, choices are complicated, and sometimes the “right” decision still feels wrong, or worse, is wrong. But perhaps that’s the most romantic thing of all: choosing something real, even when it’s imperfect, even when it’s hard, even when you’re not entirely sure. Lucy may not have gotten her fairy tale, but she got something rarer in modern romance films, a choice that feels achingly, uncomfortably human.

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