Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal make for a starry love triangle in this exquisite new film from director Celine Song, who previously made the Oscar-nominated Past Lives.

If you’ve seen any of the trailers for Celine Song’s Materialists, ignore them. In those previews and on paper, the film seems like a well-cast but stock romantic comedy, with Dakota Johnson as a professional matchmaker torn between a former love (Chris Evans) and a dazzling new possibility (Pedro Pascal). In fact, the film is hardly a romcom at all, but something far more original and captivating: a piercingly honest exploration of love and money and the inevitable connection between the two. (Just ask Jane Austen about the connection between a man with a fortune and the want of a wife.) Song doesn’t reinvent the romcom here. She cleverly sidesteps it.

Materialists is more akin to her first film, the nuanced Past Lives, than it might seem. As in Past Lives, with its delicate story of a woman whose childhood love from Korea re-enters her happily married New York life, Materialists is exquisitely made, character-driven and talky, with some glittering dialogue. It’s the kind of idiosyncratic film a director sometimes gets to do after a great success – Past Lives earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Original Screenplay – and Song makes the most of it.

Lucy’s job as a matchmaker for high-end clients might seem like a strained device, but Song herself briefly had that job before she broke through as a playwright and film-maker. And Lucy is very good at her job, as we see when she cajoles a reluctant bride (Louisa Jacobson) on her wedding day to go through with the marriage. From there the plot follows a romcom trajectory, setting up a choice. At that wedding Lucy meets the groom’s rich, handsome brother, Henry (Pascal), and is served a drink by John (Evans), the ex she broke up with after five years, who is still a struggling actor working the wedding as a waiter. A quick flashback shows that they broke up over money. Eating dinner from a food cart on their fifth anniversary was not what Lucy wanted. As always, Song creates great textured backdrops, with the breakup happening on a crowded New York street filled with traffic.

In Lucy’s new life, her non-negotiable demand is for a rich husband. “Marriage is a business deal and it always has been,” she says. That might have come across as harsh and cynical, but Johnson’s smooth performance makes Lucy seem refreshingly honest with herself about the life she wants, a reflection of the film’s clear-eyed view of how money can make or break a long-term relationship.

Pascal makes Henry utterly charming and suggests a layer of vulnerability beneath that charm. He has very little chemistry with Johnson, and whether that’s intentional or not the film gets away with it because their characters’ bond is based on a shared sense that money and lifestyle matter. “Once you’ve had your first $400 haircut you can’t go back to Supercuts,” Henry says, a line that suggests it’s improbable Lucy can go back to John. But Song is too smart to make Lucy’s decision easy or obvious. Henry doesn’t simply check all the boxes for her. He actually listens to her, and they might genuinely fall in love. Maybe she can have love and money.   

Johnson does have chemistry with Evans, who makes it clear from John’s first glance at Lucy that she is the woman he will never get over, whatever happens in the future. They have some lovely, tender moments together, which they realise they have to snap out of – or not. Why recycle a past that didn’t work?

Song gets comedy from Lucy’s clients and their impossible checklist of demands for a mate, from men’s height and amount of hair to women’s age and fitness. Johnson is so convincing we almost believe Lucy when she tells them, “I promise, you will marry the love of your life.” When she finally snaps in exasperation at one of them, she sarcastically says that of course she can deliver their perfect match “because I’m Dr Frankenstein”. But there is also drama, when another of Lucy’s clients has a date that turns violent. That’s a twist you’d never see in a standard, breezy romcom, a sign of how much Song is determined to keep the film tethered to reality.

Towards the end, Lucy dances at yet another wedding with one of her suitors to the old standard That’s All, the least materialistic love song ever, with its lyric, “I can only give you love that lasts forever.” It is the perfect song for a film that questions whether that kind of love can be real or if it’s just a fantasy in today’s material world.  

Moving on from its cynical beginning, Materialists takes the long way around to an ending that is decidedly hopeful. It offers an unblinkered, earned romanticism that suits this moment, and bolsters Song’s reputation as one of our most astute observers of relationships.

Materialists is released in US cinemas on 13 June and UK cinemas on 15 August.