The Materialists (2025) [Bad Movie Monday]

I hate tearing a movie to shreds. I really do. I try my hardest to find something redemptive about any film I watch. I love movies, and art is subjective, so if there’s even one thing to be loved about a project, I’ll find it. Even if I have to dig for it. Materialists had me hitting magma. To say there’s even one thing redemptive or enjoyable about this film is a stretch, and in spite of my best efforts, even the aspects that aren’t outright terrible can only be classified as mediocre. Wait, I take that back. I had an absolutely riotously good time laughing at quite possibly the worst use of Pedro Pascal the world will ever know, right before I started crying about how dreadful it was to witness. It’s bland, ugly, poorly made, and the characters are all so despicable that there’s not a single one you care about.

And that’s truly awful, coming from someone who really adored Past Lives, the last movie from writer/director Celine Song. Somehow, Materialists retroactively ruins that film, as well, by calling attention to how much time is spent on lingering gazes and weird “emotional pauses.” Of the nearly two hour runtime, roughly half of it is spent on dialogue free moments that should’ve been left on the cutting room floor. There’s weird moments of unfocused lens, shaky handheld camera, and, worst of all, the story has absolutely no idea what it wants to be. While it was marketed as being a romantic comedy of sorts, with our lead torn between two men vying for her love, that’s not even close to what we get. Instead, we get a messy story about a woman who is clearly not over get ex who decides to use the rich nice guy for a few weeks, along with a shoehorned subplot about a client who was sexually assaulted that feels like it was pulled out of a hat just to give the story a climactic moment after the initial plot has all but fizzled and should’ve ended. It’s like Song took an uneventful short script and decided to turn it into a dreadful feature, without anyone stopping to ask why.

Playing the lead character of Lucy with a deadpan face and weird egotistical and self centered motives is the always flat and uninteresting Dakota Johnson. I suppose that subplot about the sexual assault, and her supposed disdain with herself for having inadvertently caused it, was supposed to add some kind of depth and humility to her otherwise unrelatable and utterly moronic personality. It doesn’t. The woman is also apparently allergic to money, as anytime there’s so much as the breath of a dollar blown in her direction, she starts running. Yet she claims she’s materialistic. What’s the name of the movie again? Chris Evans looks like he can barely hold his eyes open every time he’s on screen, and even worse, he appears repulsed at the thought of kissing Johnson, with their chemistry about as fiery as Antarctica. That said, it’s even worse with Pedro Pascal, who demeans himself to the point of absurdity. And if you thought his character couldn’t go any lower, he does. Literally. While his performance is the only standout in the film, his character is written in a way that makes him too good to be true. An extraordinarily rich and handsome man who becomes enamored with a wholly average and narcissistic woman who’s only downside is that he *checks notes* used to be short and had surgery to make him taller? Again, the film doesn’t have any clue what it wants to be, or what it wants to say. We even get to watch a caveman propose to his cave-girlfriend and make her his cave-fiancée. Make sense of that one.

The color palette is atrociously ugly, with dull tones of mauve and beige that made me physically ill, and the music is so bad that it’s like ice picks in your eardrums. The cinematography is messy, and it almost looks like they completely skipped color grading on many scenes. And again I’ll mention the fact that it’s badly in need of editing. Do we need 50 shots of Dakota Johnson blinking slowly?

Longing gazes, misleading marketing, and unlikeable characters all culminate into one big ugly mess that’s called Materialists for no reason whatsoever. I used to think our Lord and Savior Pedro Pascal could save anything. I was wrong.