Celine Song’s recent film Materialists is being heavily marketed as a romantic comedy, but it very clearly wants to be more than that; in fact, it barely wants to be a romantic comedy at all. Now, its distributors will happily take on the label, and have their trio of stars lustily paraded through press junkets under the auspices of such, since it would not do to attract summer audiences by advertising a rather clinical, and even grim, take on the yuppy millennial dating scene in place of the sappy crowd-pleaser they are expecting. To be sure, Song is under no obligation to strictly adhere to genre conventions, but in this case, what said genre is typically known for—whimsy, charm, actual humor, etc.—are the very things Materialists desperately needs, sterilized as it is by an awkward script and mediocre acting from (plus bad chemistry between) 2/3rds of its top-billed cast.

At the very beginning, Song takes her audience back thousands of years to what her protagonist describes as “the first marriage” (something along those lines) where a man in furs brings flowers and a makeshift ring to a tribal woman. The atmosphere is hushed and reserved. This is serious business—we are witnessing the prehistoric origins of courting. Never mind, of course, retroactively pinning such a modern term/concept as “marriage” onto the activities of Paleolithic personas. For the purposes of Materialists, “love” and “marriage” are mostly interchangeable, and have been since the dawn of human culture. We will return to this odd conceptual anachronism later on, particularly when it comes to the baffling behavior/mindset of Song’s protagonist. […]