Celine Song’s Materialists has sparked a strange online debate, with people joking that the film is “broke boy propaganda” because its romantic center of gravity leans toward a man who can’t afford the lifestyle its heroine sells. But reducing the film to that punchline misses the far more incisive point Song is making: Materialists isn’t a romcom. It’s a critique—an autopsy of the dating marketplace we’ve built, the value systems we obey, and the emotional collateral we pretend not to notice.
At the heart of the story is Lucy, a razor-sharp professional matchmaker who treats dating like a marketplace. She sorts clients into “mainstream” or “niche” appeal, optimizes their profiles like résumés, and bluntly claims, “Marriage is a business deal… and it always has been.” This perspective isn’t theoretical; Song herself worked as a high-end matchmaker in New York. So the film’s height requirements, “unicorn” clients, and exhaustive intake sessions aren’t satire—they’re pulled from the real world. Song shows a dating culture where romance is priced, bodies are audited, and everyone is competing in an economy disguised as intimacy.
The film opens with a fable-like scene of a prehistoric man tying a flower around his partner’s finger—a wordless gesture, a gift without a market. Song has explained that this image represents a kind of emotional “first principles”: love as something that predates money, status, or optimization. From that moment forward, the film stages a philosophical argument between gift and transaction. Everything in modern dating—the outfits, the venues, the apps, the checklists—becomes an answer to the question: what happens when love becomes a product?
Lucy embodies that tension visually and narratively. When she walks into a wedding wearing a saturated blue dress among a sea of bridal whites and neutrals, the costume tells the truth before she ever speaks: Lucy is control, clarity, competence, and distance. She is not participating in the romantic fantasy; she is managing it. She’s the brand, not the bride. Her job is to price people, not risk being priced herself. This is echoed in the terrace scene where she and a wealthy client coldly evaluate a woman’s “market fit”—declaring she has no mainstream appeal, no niche appeal, and ultimately, “no place in any market.” It’s one of the film’s most brutal moments because it exposes a truth most people would rather euphemize: dating apps have taught us to think like procurement officers, not partners.
Yet Song is careful to show that the marketplace distorts everyone, not just women. The film’s running joke—or horror, depending on your view—is the idea that Harry and his brother might undergo height surgery to increase their desirability. What sounds comedic reveals the same logic applied to men: height becomes a KPI; pain becomes capital expenditure; masculinity becomes product design. When a woman quips, “You’re not ugly, just broke,” the line lands because it describes the system with uncomfortable accuracy. Women get packaged; men get measured. The market flattens everyone differently, but it flattens them all.
Where the film’s critique deepens is through Sophie, Lucy’s client who lands the “perfect on paper” match. He has the income, pedigree, stability, and social polish that matchmakers are trained to prioritize. And yet the relationship quietly withers. Sophie admits she is “trying to settle,” a confession that reveals the hollowness of optimization. Credentials can’t manufacture emotional safety. Excellent résumés don’t guarantee kindness. Algorithms can filter for compatibility, but they can’t create character. Sophie becomes the crack in Lucy’s entire worldview—the living proof that the marketplace can secure comfort but not connection.
This is also where John enters as a counterpoint to Lucy’s curated, optimized world. He’s imperfect. He’s broke. He’s terrified of being unable to give her the life she’s taught herself to desire. When he tells her, “I still can’t afford to be with you,” the line isn’t melodrama; it’s class despair sharpened by romantic longing. But he is also the only man in the film who actually sees her—who remembers her “diesel” drink (a Coke-and-beer mix), a working-class detail that Harry would never catch. Harry responds to the persona; John responds to the person. This distinction is the true romantic axis of the film, and it’s intentionally unglamorous. Song isn’t asking the audience to pick John over Harry. She’s asking whether love can survive if it has to be engineered to exist at all.
Psychology research supports the film’s thesis: people with stronger materialistic values often have higher partner standards, more conflict, and lower relationship satisfaction. Prioritizing possessions over experiences weakens emotional bonds, while insecurity fuels the desire to “self-soothe” with wealth and status. In other words, the very values that promise security end up sabotaging the intimacy they claim to protect.
The film closes with an echo of the opening fable—another ring, another ritual, stripped of luxury and placed back into the realm of gesture. Song’s final argument isn’t anti-money or anti-status. It’s anti-manipulation. Love that must be optimized, packaged, calibrated, or gamed stops being love. The more we treat relationships like transactions, the more alienated we become from the tenderness that makes them worth pursuing.
So no, Materialists is not “broke boy propaganda.” It’s a mirror held up to a dating culture obsessed with value, validation, and visibility at the expense of vulnerability. It isn’t telling women to choose a poor man; it’s telling all of us to examine the logic we’re using when we’re choosing anyone at all. The film insists that the rituals of love can survive modernity—but only if we reclaim them from the market that keeps trying to price them.
In the end, the question isn’t whether love or money guarantees security. It’s the harder, quieter question Song keeps posing:
If love has to be manipulated to exist, was it ever love to begin with?
Screen Siren 