Lucy Macdonald reflects on Celine Song’s new romcom The Materialists and the deeper questions it raises about love, wealth, and what truly satisfies. Beneath the glittering Manhattan skyline, she finds surprising echoes of ancient biblical wisdom.
Last night I went with friends to the cinema to watch Celine Song’s glittering new romcom The Materialists. It’s the kind of film that sparkles on the surface: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal tangled in a love triangle of wealth, desire and memory. But beneath the glossy Manhattan apartments and champagne flutes, I found myself thinking: this film, for all its modern wit, is circling around something the Bible has been saying for centuries.
The premise is simple. Lucy, played by Johnson, is a successful New York matchmaker. She has every reason to live the life she curates for others: elegance, beauty, a future secured by wealth. Her suitor Harry (Pedro Pascal) offers her luxury and stability. Yet her ex, John (Chris Evans), reappears: the struggling actor who understands her in ways money alone cannot. The question is: does she choose love or lifestyle? (Fret not, I’m not going to give the answer away here!)
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Watching Lucy weigh her choices, I heard the echo of Proverbs: “Those who trust in their riches will fall, but the righteous will thrive like a green leaf” (11:28). The Bible doesn’t romanticise poverty, nor demonise wealth but it does warn against relying on money for fulfilment. The Materialists, knowingly or not, seems to nod to the same truth: the security wealth promises may come with an emptiness that no champagne dinner or exotic foreign holiday can ever fill.
What struck me most wasn’t the triangle itself, but how modern it felt.
What struck me most wasn’t the triangle itself, but how modern it felt. Song’s film is sharp in showing how transactional love can feel in a capitalist culture. And yet, this is not so far from what Jesus observed in his own time.
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He watched people treat marriage as merely a contract. In Matthew 19:3–9, the Pharisees ask: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” They saw marriage as something to be ended when convenient. Jesus responds by going back to creation, to the beginning where God sanctified the union of marriage as sacred: “What God has joined together, let no one separate.” He shifts the focus from transaction to covenant, from convenience to faithfulness.
Jesus also witnessed people treating faith as a transaction. In John 2:13–16, Jesus walks into the temple courts and finds them buzzing like a market. Sacrifices had always been part of Israel’s worship, a God-given way for His people to draw near in repentance and trust. But somewhere along the way, that sacred exchange had turned into profiteering. Animals were sold at inflated prices, coins exchanged for profit, devotion reduced to business.
Faith was never meant to be a marketplace; it was always meant to be covenant, an invitation to connection.
Jesus’ response is fierce. He flips tables, scatters coins, drives out the sellers. Not because sacrifice was wrong, but because the heart of worship had been lost. Faith was never meant to be a marketplace; it was always meant to be covenant, an invitation to connection. Over and over, he redirected people to something deeper: covenant, faithfulness, the kind of love that isn’t for sale.
Paul’s famous words in 1 Corinthians 13 remind us: “Love is patient, love is kind… it is not self-seeking.” The difference between Lucy’s two men isn’t simply wealth versus poverty. It’s transaction versus covenant, status versus intimacy. One man offers her the world’s comforts; the other offers her himself.
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The choice is not simple. Song is too clever a filmmaker to hand us an easy answer.
In one sense, The Materialists reads like Ecclesiastes for the Netflix generation: everything that is beautiful by the world’s standards is fleeting. With Harry, Lucy is radiant in her designer clothes and enjoys the food of Michelin-star chefs, but the viewer senses a restlessness within her. She has all the options the world envies, but she doesn’t yet have peace. “Whoever loves money never has enough” (Ecclesiastes 5:10). Richard Forster states: “The unreasoned boast abounds that the good life is found in accumulation, that ‘more is better.’ Indeed we often accept this notion without question, with the result that the lust for affluence in contemporary society has become psychotic: it has completely lost touch with reality.”
We left the cinema thinking that our culture still wrestles with exactly the same question that Scripture has always asked: what truly satisfies? The Bible gives its answer plainly: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). But even if the film doesn’t go that far, it at least reveals the cracks in our materialist dreams. The champagne goes flat. The penthouse is lonely. And there is still a longing for love that is faithful, self-giving, enduring.
The Materialists and the Bible share a strange kinship. Both acknowledge that wealth is alluring, admit that love is complicated and ultimately, tell us that money cannot carry the human soul. Song’s rom-com might not name God as the answer, but it does leave us looking for something more solid than a shiny lifestyle.
Of course, even marriage to financially-challenged John would also not end up in the ultimate fulfilment for our Lucy. A human, however tall and handsome, is never going be enough for any woman. And that’s where Scripture whispers across the centuries that there is only one love that is eternal rather than material. It’s the steadfast love of Jesus Christ.
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