The Decade of the Love Triangle: Aoife Kilbane McGowan reviews Celine Songs’ Materialists.
The 2020s are turning out to be the decade of the love triangle film. In contrast to Hollywood's nostalgia-heavy focus in the 2010s, recent films including Luca Guadaganino's tennis-fueled, sexually fluid Challengers (2024), and Celine Song's 2023 debut Past Lives, are putting the battle between love, lust, and power on centre-screen. Dublin's own independent Cinema, The Lighthouse, even ran a summer series based on the genre, screening timeless love-triangle classics alongside some newcomers; including Song's latest release, Materialists.
So what is driving the popularity of this dynamic? The love triangle forces our characters to make definitive choices, about who they want to be with and which person brings out the true version of themselves. In Past Lives, this tension thrives in geography and culture. There is a constant battle between the life one builds, and the place and people you must leave behind to fully embrace it. Similarly, Challengers investigates the hold that appearances have over our romantic choices. Success in the deeply heterosexist world of professional sports demands a kind of unfeeling logic and self-repression.
In Materialists however, Dakota Johnson's character Lucy is a matchmaker for New York's upper crust, working with detached clients who want to order a partner, not unlike how one orders a burrito from Boojum. She is good at her job, her demeanour is emotionally removed, and love is a strategy game that she coaches people through.
Lucy’s own triangle emerges when she winds up sitting across from the groom’s brother at a prior client's wedding. Harry (Pedro Pascal) is less interested in Lucy's matchmaking services than he is her, but his advances are interrupted by her drink order being slammed down on the table, courtesy of her ex-boyfriend and waiter, John (Chris Evans). Here the battle begins, and we weave through the present and past of her relationships with both men.
This dynamic allows director Celine Song to thread her recurring interest in fate, choice, and self-construction into a sharper critique of how money mediates intimacy. One flashback scene shows Lucy and John's first anniversary: running late to their reservation, poorly planned, and her frustration at his own poor financial self-esteem. In Past Lives, Song explored the idea of parallel paths, showing us what might have been. In Materialists, she asks a more pointed question: in a world where capital determines freedom, is love ever really a free choice?
The film repeatedly stages conversations around money not just as subtext, but as declaration. Lucy’s wealthy clients talk openly about their requirements for a partner, stressing the need for a shared social circle, a willingness to vacation in specific European enclaves and a certain polish that signals compatibility. These demands often reduce love to a checklist. As a result, the unsettling truth highlighted by the film is that Lucy’s role is not far removed from the world of dating apps where algorithms and preferences filter desire into market categories. What happens, then, when affection and attraction are indistinguishable from purchasing power?
The film’s title, Materialists, is not just a jeer at the clients Lucy serves, but a provocation for the audience. Who among us can claim not to be materialist when material conditions shape the contours of our desires? The film makes clear that love cannot be abstracted from the economic realities of life: the ability to afford children, to withstand a medical emergency, to live in a city that constantly demands rent. Romantic idealism often pretends money is irrelevant, but Song insists it is the silent third party in every relationship — the unacknowledged presence in the love triangle.
What distinguishes Materialists from other recent love triangle dramas is that its resolution is not an emotional payoff. Lucy is still the same distant woman who sat down at the singles table. By portraying this, Song contends that relationships are inevitably negotiations between desire and circumstance.
The performances are all proficient, and Zoe Winters as Sophie is a standout in the supporting cast. However, the film does falter in its constant stoicism, particularly when a traumatic event happens to one of Lucy's clients. Johnson's reserved and restrained performance, regrettably stunts the emotional impact.
Ultimately, Materialists insists that we cannot talk about love without talking about money. It follows the story of who Lucy will choose and what version of life she can sustain. In the end, the film finds that love in the 2020s is never free-floating, but always tethered — to geography, to power, to wealth. At the end of the day, are we all not attached to our own material comforts?