Is ‘Materialists’ Actually A Horror Movie?

Celine Song’s new movie Materialists was released last weekend, and immediately became one of the top three A24 openings ever. It comes in a notch below Hereditary and slightly higher than Talk to Me or Heretic, and if it seems like an outlier in that company, the broader A24 top ten wide openings confirms it: Six of them are horror movies, and the remaining three are all high-tension thrillers designed to give audiences a similar sensation. Then again, maybe Materialists will fit in just fine with this group; it received a B- grade from longtime opening-night polling firm CinemaScore, which is low for a crowd-pleasing romantic comedy, but higher than Heretic (CinemaScore: C+) or Hereditary (CinemaScore: D+). All of which raises the question: Is Materialists actually a horror movie?

Obviously in terms of white knuckles and on-screen bloodshed, it is not—but then, it’s not really a romantic comedy, either, which is probably what accounts for that middling audience reaction. The set-up is pure rom-com: Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a successful New York professional in the field of matchmaking, celebrating her ninth successful match (which is to say, one culminating in marriage) as the film begins, and not particularly on the hunt for her own true love. This is essentially the premise of countless 21st-century big-studio romantic comedies; what is a matchmaker if not a longer-range wedding planner or a bridesmaid with a contract? Tellingly, Lucy isn’t just celebrating a client’s wedding at the beginning of the film; she’s also attending it, implying her job isn’t really finished until both parties say “I do.”

At that wedding, Lucy meets the groom’s brother Harry (Pedro Pascal), who—again, in keeping with rom-com tradition—seems like a strong match for her, especially given her stated desire to marry rich. The ex who seemingly instilled that desire in her is still-struggling actor John (Chris Evans), who she also happens to see at this wedding; he’s working the event as a waiter. It’s the perfect opportunity to pit a man who checks the right boxes against a man who, as we see in one uncomfortable flashback sequence, hems and haws over paying an extra $25 for an evening of parking.

Only Materialists doesn’t ever let the three-way sparks fly. Lucy, both because of how Song writes her and how Johnson plays her, doesn’t lean into Type-A Fixer shtick, where a rat-a-tat professional becomes unmoored by personal-life turmoil. For much of the movie, she remains calm and composed; her in-person communication sounds, at times, a bit like an email come to life. (“Talk soon.”) The boys, too, stay cordial. One scene primes us for a confrontation between the suave Harry (who Lucy does indeed begin to date) and the scrappier John. The couple is at a bar after attending one of John’s plays, John and Lucy argue privately about her boyfriend, and Lucy tells Harry they’re leaving. Harry lingers at the bar to pay their tab, John is next to him, and Song cuts away. There’s no cathartic confrontation between the two, then or later. Their respective relationships with Lucy are their own. It’s a far cry from the crowd-pleasing slapstick boy-fight from Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Zaniness is in short supply throughout. Lucy’s sometimes demanding, sometimes desperate clientele are the source of some of the movie’s laughs, but they’re grimly familiar rather than “relatable” pratfalls: Dating is depicted as a transactional, emotionally draining collision of priorities, where men are obsessed with youth (one middle-aged client’s idea of a more mature, together match still won’t include anyone over 28) and women are obsessed with height, among other ultimately arbitrary “boxes.” And it pointedly gets worse: Lucy’s faith in her profession is shaken when her understandably but tragically imperfect judgment results in a client having an awful, life-changing experience. Though it’s largely kept off-screen, this subplot probably has more in common with the likes of Companion or Fresh, albeit without such outsized violence (or ham-fisted dark-comic “commentary”).