Materialists was good. I still didn’t like it.

When I first watched the Materialists trailer, I was in a weird spot in my life. I had recently ended a long-term relationship and, in my desperation to reorient myself in a dating landscape I’d never quite understood, let alone enjoyed, I had joined a matchmaking service. Needless to say, the movie caught my interest – it was as though Celine Song knew exactly what I was going through.

But then, more or less three months later, I watched the movie in a very different state of mind. I’ve been on some dates through the matchmaking service, only to be left with warm but dispassionate feelings about the whole thing. Instead, I ended up meeting someone more organically. He doesn’t check every box I’d created for my poor matchmaker to satisfy, sure, and it still isn’t exactly a relationship… But I’m content enough.

And yet, despite the fact that Song’s new release touches on the pain and complexity of modern dating like I’d hoped and comes to the same conclusion that I did – that love isn’t about perfection – I still found myself feeling a bit dissatisfied.

The question is: why?

I want to get this out of the way first: you should absolutely watch Materialists. If you watch the trailer and think it’s a lame, trope-y romcom… Well, do you even know who Song is? Yes, the film is a romcom, but it’s so much more than that too. Instead of focusing on the love triangle, Materialists highlights the story of a single woman who suddenly finds herself forced to confront love not as business (which it naturally is for her, as a matchmaker) but as an impossible to navigate minefield.

She sees men say they want an older woman, by which they mean a 25-year-old. She sees women who raise, not lower, their already ridiculous standards the longer they remain single. She also sees the real, tangible danger that comes with dating when one of her clients is sexually assaulted.

All the while, she’s dealing with an uncertain romantic situation. Her ex comes back into her life, reminding her of all the things that came in the way of their love – their true love. At the same time as she meets a seemingly perfect man. He’s rich, he’s handsome, he’s nice… But there’s something missing. And so, in the end, she rejects him and gets back with her ex, a sweet ending that highlights the importance of feelings rather than material goods.

It’s a nice fantasy, for sure.

Really, I think that’s the core of my complaint about Materialists : it’s selling me a sweet fantasy, but I’m of an age at this point where I’m ready to face the truth. Past Lives, Song’s previous hit, ended with a hard-to-swallow truth about the enduring love of a relationship that wasn’t fated to be, at least in this life. That bittersweet pill made me feel seen, and it made me fall in love with the film. So why is Materialists so blindly optimistic?

I’m not saying Dakota Johnson’s character should end up with the rich man, but the reality is that financial difficulties are one of the leading causes of divorce. She shouldn’t have ended up with her ex either. The truth is that love does not, in fact, conquer all.

I think a much more poignant ending, one that would have truly broken with the romcom format and preserved the more heartbreakingly realist tone of Past Lives, would be having Dakota Johnson’s character end up alone, debating whether or not to date again. Maybe we’d see her setting up an account on a dating app, or glancing uncertainly at a man on the other side of the bar. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she’s grown: she sees the value of love over material now, but she also has a better grasp of the danger that finding love entails. Her new journey is figuring out how to navigate that.

I also think Pedro Pascal’s character could have been handled better. When Johnson rejects him, he talks about how hard love is, and she assures him it will be easy with the right person. But what if that never happens? What if he’s aromantic, or just terribly unlucky? I think it would have added an interesting emotional depth if the movie confronted those possibilities. If you can’t love or you can’t find love, what should you do? Is a “love as business” arrangement okay then? Should you be doomed to be forever alone? There’s no answer to those questions, of course, but raising them is much better than brushing them away with meaningless platitudes.

In the end, I can’t say that Materialists was a bad film, because it wasn’t. It tackles the complexities of modern dating with both realism and empathy, and it shows a beautiful journey of self-exploration along the way. The only issue is that I can’t help thinking of an after-credits scene, 5 years later, where Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans are fighting over the fact that they can’t provide a better life for their children. For all their romantic words, reality is going to hit sooner or later.

Love isn’t easy, nor is it simple – Past Lives made that clear enough. And while Materialists offers a world where everything works out in the end, I wish Song had instead reminded us that sometimes, it doesn’t, and that in the pain of uncertainty lies the beauty of possibility.