Issue 39: Materialists
Currently on Materialists.
📝 Reviewing: Materialists (2025)
Celine Song’s 2023 debut, Past Lives, was released to critical acclaim, earning nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.
The story follows Nora and Hae Sung, childhood friends in Korea who are separated when Nora’s family emigrates to Canada. Years later, they reconnect online and begin to rekindle their bond, only to drift apart again. Eventually, Hae Sung visits Nora in New York, where she now lives with her husband, Arthur.
All of this unfolds under the idea of In-Yun, a Korean concept suggesting that people are connected across lifetimes through fate, the result of thousands of interactions in past lives.
Most of the film is built on silence, long pauses, and glances. There’s very little actual interaction or exploration of who these characters are. They act like they’re living a remarkable love story, but the truth is, they don’t have much of anything to say to each other, and it feels routine. Nora and Hae Sung met in grade school at the age of twelve. Then twelve years later, Hae Sung tracks Nora down on Facebook. He messages her on Skype. Another twelve years pass before he travels to New York to see her. At one point, he says:
“What if I’d come to New York twelve years ago? What if you had never left Seoul? If you hadn’t just left like that, and we just grew up together… would I still have looked for you? Would we have dated? Broken up? Gotten married? Had kids?”
For a film so fascinated by fate, its characters don’t seem to believe in it. That’s a whole lot of what-ifs for someone who supposedly believes in destiny.
And all this longing ignores the fact that Nora is happily married to a man she met unexpectedly at a retreat—something you might call fate.
I don’t remember who I had a crush on when I was twelve. And even if I did, I wouldn’t show up in their life asking to video chat, suggest a visit, and then prompt them to question every decision they’ve made. That’s the issue with many relationships today: people fall in love with the idea of someone, not the person right in front of them. A crush is just a lack of information, a projection of who we want a person to be.
Which brings me to Materialists.
Celine Song is back with another story of three characters, two men and one woman (again), in New York City (again), confronting love, destiny, and the choices that shape a life (again). In Past Lives, the decades-spanning structure gave us glimpses into who these people were. But here, the character background is thinner. We see the homes of the two men—one rich, one poor—but learn almost nothing about the protagonist, Lucy. We don’t know how she lives, what she loves, or what she does outside of work. Without that, there are no stakes. We can’t root for her.
Lucy describes herself as hard to please, difficult, judgmental, and superficial. So when emotional and revelatory moments arrive, they fall flat. We’re not given enough to care. She’s in love with the idea of both men but chooses the one who feels most familiar: the one she knows how to fight with, the one she can control, the one whose apartment feels second nature. The man who is second best.
I appreciate the nods to the pitfalls of modern dating, but the film, like Past Lives, just didn’t land for me. Maybe that’s because I’ve worked hard to build healthy relationships. No what-ifs, no regrets. A conscious, all-in kind of love. Every past relationship I’ve had isn’t a failure—it’s a foundation, each one making the next better.
And maybe that’s why I struggle with films like these, stories that romanticize indecision, comparison, and emotional unavailability, while suggesting everything works out in the end. I want to see more films that explore what it takes to build something healthy, not just chase something dramatic.
Love is not an idea of a person. Love is not a backup plan.
Love is a choice. Love is magic. Love is sparks. Love is running through the streets to get to someone, not running through the streets to get away.
Thanks for being here.
— Justin