It may look like a rom-com, but Materialists is not a first-date movie

After the wistful, what-if heartache of 2023's Past Lives, Celine Song has now set her sights on the zero-sum game of dating.

Materialists slyly presents as a glossy 2000s rom-com, a milieu well suited for the writer-director's elegant dialogue and her eye for luminous New York backdrops. There was every expectation that this anticipated follow-up — with its heftier budget and an A-list cast — would take a crowd-pleasing turn.

Instead, Song takes on the genre with a contemporary cynicism. Her glamorous cosmopolitan setting is host to a trio of deluded, self-loathing characters, its Cinderella fantasy joylessly reduced to its class components.

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Speaking to the ABC's Screen Show, Song outlines the film's primary tension: "None of us are merchandise; we're people. So why is it that we treat ourselves, and each other, like we're merchandise?"

At the centre of Materialists' love triangle is Lucy (a wry Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker whose craft revolves around a ruthless calculus of compatible incomes, ages, weights and heights between New York's elite. Dating is taken as a capitalist enterprise, with clients being assigned market value, then traded accordingly.

Song recalls her own experience in that profession, in which intimate desire and needs were defined by terms that felt more relevant to an insurance company or a morgue.

"That's the kind of language that they were using to describe the person who has to be the love of your life. The gap between that and what I knew about love, and what I know about love, felt so vast.

"That really fascinated and stressed me out, it's really the reason why I wanted to make this movie."

Taking after Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, Pedro Pascal plays an old-money private equity investor, Harry, who's all too familiar with the rules of the game. He's the perfect suitor for Lucy, whose sole, immutable criterion for a mate — having watched her parents torn apart by financial hardship — is independent wealth. Beyond preventing a future of bickering over bills, Harry's considerable largesse makes her feel valued.

Lucy's ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), is a struggling actor on the opposite end of New York's economic strata, still confined to the cramped apartment of his 20s. When they reunite at a wedding for one of Lucy's clients, he's working a side gig as a cater waiter, which barely keeps him afloat. Lucy playfully suggests they may be soulmates — but above all, he's a bad financial decision.

In screenings, Song found that the reveal of Harry's $12 million apartment could be relied upon to induce an audible response, no matter the audience.

"Wealth is the most seductive thing; it is the greatest drug that is possible in modern society," Song says.

"When you think about the Victorian romances, we have not come very far from talking about marriage and love only in relation to how much it's going to secure your life."

Materialists is bracingly honest, even cruel, in its depiction of Lucy's world. Her myopic outlook has the underlying logic of pick-up artistry, in which sexual attraction can be distilled into formula, and courtship is merely bartering. She can only treat Harry's romantic proposition with an intense disbelief; why would a "unicorn" like him settle for someone like her?

Song has a disarming way of testing the audience's own beliefs, in part because our engagement with dating apps and social media seems to affirm that same impoverished mindset. You won't see another film this year that so openly discusses the romantic odds for shorter men, which feels serendipitously timed with the recent announcement of Tinder's height filter.

When Lucy describes a problem client, Sophie (Zoë Winters), as being a "nice girl" who's ultimately "not competitive", it's easy to relate to her thinking: dating apps are flooded with people whose best qualities are not on their surface.

"Social media is contributing rapidly and very negatively towards the commodification of human beings … it just all becomes about expressing a value," the director says.

The more we buy into that system, the more we have to lose. "Your whole life is going to be about modifying not just each other, but also yourself."

The messy, unsparing drama of Materialists doesn't always cohere with its knowing deployment of rom-com tropes. Passion is kept at a minimum while misery is laid on thick, with precious few jokes peeking through. Lucy's spiritual rot is broadened into staggering obliviousness, particularly in a subplot that indelicately handles the darker implications of her work.

While Lucy's chemistry with Harry (or rather, Harry's assets) is deliberately distant, John doesn't quite inspire the kind of longing to work as a counterbalance — or perhaps there's an inherent disconnect between watching a star as bright as Chris Evans playing someone so downtrodden, even if his own acting career has been in the doldrums as of late.

(Naturally, Johnson is perfect at playing a character whose own aloofness seems to keep her at a distance from the human race, and relishes in dithering put-downs when the film calls for it.)

Materialists may well be a hostile viewing experience for unsuspecting audiences — it's certainly not recommended as a first-date movie. But the piercing clarity of Song's approach holds up once the shock wears off, and lays bare the inadequacies of how we negotiate romance.

"I'm always trying to depict a business deal of some kind; sometimes love is on the table, and sometimes it isn't."