Playwright turned filmmaker Celine Song really burst out of the gate strong with her moving and melancholy feature-length directorial debut, “Past Lives.” Not only was the drama a big hit at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, but it was the rare debut to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. So for her follow-up, “The Materialists,” Song is seemingly doing something totally different: a romantic comedy in the more traditional 1980s sense of the genre.
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Starring the excellent trio of Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal, “The Materialists” centers on a love triangle set in New York with a professional matchmaker caught in the middle of two men.
“The Materialists” also features Marin Ireland, Louisa Jacobson, Sawyer Spielberg, Eddie Cahill, Joseph Lee, John Magaro, and Dasha Nekrasova.
Like “Past Lives,” Song’s latest is autobiographical in nature—the director worked as a New York matchmaker as a side hustle when she was a struggling playwright.
“In that time, I learned more about people and what’s in their hearts than I have in any other period of my life,” Song told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview. “I was interested in that gap between the way we talk about the partners that one wants and what it’s like to actually meet somebody that is a partner for life.”
Don’t think the rom-com genre is underneath an indie auteur like Song either. Although Song admits that the drama “sits uncomfortably but happily in the genre…pushing against the traditional sense of the genre as it exists,” she takes it all very seriously.
“I think that requires as much gravity as any other thing that can exist in cinema,” Song said about portraying love on screen. “Matters of the heart are a very, very serious matter. I think we would like to pretend like it’s not, but I feel like I have to be quite real about it. It’s a universal theme and also a universal mystery. I don’t know anybody who says that they know everything about love. Why do you think I make movies about love? It’s a mystery to me. I think about it every day. I think it’s one of the great mysteries of life.”
Here’s the official synopsis:
A young, ambitious New York City matchmaker finds herself torn between the perfect match and her imperfect ex.
“The Materialists” opens in theaters June 13, 2025, via A24. Watch the new trailer below.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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