To See Is to Love

Reflections on Celine Song's Materialists

It’s no secret that Celine Song knows how to artfully craft a film that aches with longing and cozies up to the complexities of the human experience. But while her debut film Past Lives (2023) addresses the pain of letting go of what didn’t work out, Materialists (2025) meditates on the discomfort of choosing to hold onto something that just might work out. If Past Lives is tragically nostalgic, Materialists is tentatively hopeful. It is a delicate offering to a world that makes dateability a prerequisite for being considered well-adjusted and supplies only a pathetic array of dating apps to those who overstay their singlehood. Song’s latest work gently holds up a mirror to the viewer and asks “Why do you want to be loved so much?”. Fittingly, mirrors are a physical symbol utilized by Song throughout the first half of the film to invite movie-goers to enter into a practice of self-reflection with her.

(Note: If you haven’t yet seen the film and want to avoid spoilers, save this review and come back to it later.)

After a wildly bold opening scene (which absolutely pays off) featuring a dating neanderthal couple, the film time-jumps to modern day NYC where viewers meet Lucy, a professional matchmaker, as she prepares for her day. These first shots of Lucy do not show her directly, but rather her image as reflected in a set of mirrors. Lucy is the name given to the 3.2-million-year-old female hominid skeleton sometimes called the “missing link” in human evolution, but in this story, Lucy’s name is not tied to flesh-and-bone reality but to the visual perception our protagonist curates and presents to others. The mirror mediates all. Lucy’s salon-styled vanity mirror (the kind framed by orbs) shows her applying makeup and adjusting accessories, the horizontal mirror by her door shows her leaving her chic apartment, and (in a later scene) the polished paneling of a banquet hall reflects wedding guests dancing to “Sweet Caroline.” Without resorting to clichéd insert shots of phone screens and didactic commentary on the online simulacrum of social media, Song quietly establishes a distanced world where people are viewed and allotted value indirectly.

But much like the worlds-without-end effect produced by two looking glasses positioned directly opposite each other, there are layers to Song’s mirrors. Not only do they reflect the aforementioned outward-facing alter egos, optimized to emphasize one’s most attractive attributes, but they simultaneously act as memento mori (artistic reminders of one’s own mortality) and warnings of how love can be used to dress self-obsession in sheep’s clothing. Frequently found in vanitas art (remember the opening shots of Lucy in her vanity mirror?), memento mori are objects that stress to viewers that youth and vitality are transient, and death an omnipresent reality. The mirrors in Materialists expose imperfect truths about the characters, even as those characters attempt to use these reflective surfaces to adjust their images. One prominent example is the smudged, broken medicine cabinet in John’s bathroom that reveals a mess of half-used hair products and orange prescription bottles behind its mirrored encasement—a chaotic interiority that speaks to the previous “death” of John’s 5-year relationship with Lucy.

While Materialists’ mirror-gilded set reminds its characters of their fallible humanity, these characters also seek out human counterparts they can use as mirrors to soothe an insatiable need, born of insecurity, to be assigned value through a partner. At the wedding ceremony of her client Charlotte, Lucy consoles a troubled bride who fears she is only marrying her fiancé because he makes her sister jealous. Lucy masterfully reframes Charlotte’s words, insisting this means that she loves how her fiancé makes her feel valuable. But this form of “love” is transactional; it takes, but doesn’t give. There is no investment required, only continual withdrawals. In this egocentric equation, to be seen is to be loved. What you yourself might see in a partner is irrelevant.

In the same way that characters turn to mirrors in a variety of forms to selectively conceal and reveal parts of themselves, they also turn to the camera itself in a manner reminiscent of talking head interviews. As Lucy meets one-on-one with clients, Song chooses to portray their interactions with only one person in frame at a time, alternating between Lucy and her rotating roster of “shoppers” who demand impossibly precise age ranges, heights, weights, lifestyles, and politics in potential partners. As viewers face these singular figures on screen, they may be surprised to see parts of themselves in Lucy’s clients and these ridiculous lists of must-haves. In this way, the camera’s position acts as a mirror for viewers.

Not only does Song’s positioning of the camera act as a confrontational mirror for her audience, but her maneuvering of it does as well. One camera movement Song executes with particular skill is the gradual zoom-in. In several scenes throughout Materialists, she portrays characters facing each other in long shots that include the bustling scenes around them before slowly cropping out that surrounding visual noise as the characters’ lines increase in intensity and intimacy. This visual language pairs deliciously with Song’s dialogue which is sharp but never forced; vulnerable but never melodramatic. The visual and the verbal initially position viewers as casual eavesdroppers removed from the main characters who exist in a self-contained tableau before the camera then brings the audience uncomfortably near the characters where viewers may once again see parts of themselves in these up-close interactions.

Through her use of mirrors and reflections, Song successfully collapses space, requiring her audience to look inward, an exercise of grit that is mirrored by the visual grit of the 35mm film stock she records on. As the film progresses, however, the mirrors disappear as characters begin to actually look at each other instead of obsessing over their own reflections. After being purged of optical obtrusions, the narrative nears its end. It is here that Song begins collapsing time as well as space. With the exception of the opening scene, Song keeps her narrative grounded in the present day; that is, until the final sequences when the story’s timeline begins to self-reflexively fold in on itself. After Lucy decides to build a life with John, a voiceover transports the audience back to the neanderthal world and its couple, content in each other’s arms. The story then returns to NYC as John crosses into Central Park, where he is meeting Lucy. Behind him are massive advertisements outside the Natural History Museum for an exhibit on neanderthal life. When John finds Lucy on a park bench, he takes a flower from the bouquet he has brought her, fashions a ring out of its stem and slides it onto her finger. The God’s eye view shot used to capture this symbolic gesture is an exact reflection of the one used to capture the same action of the neanderthal couple at the beginning of the film. With this move, Song suggests that the rituals associated with romance and dating (such as gifting flowers or giving each other rings) are neither modern nor arbitrary; they are time-honored offerings that represent a willingness to give instead of take. This collapse of time is then playfully exaggerated during the closing credits wherein Lucy and John enter a crowded courthouse to tie the knot. After they exit the frame hand in hand, who should walk through those same doors but the neanderthal duo themselves. Choosing to see instead of insisting on being seen, whether in 10,000 BCE or in 2025, remains the purest expression of love.

“Love is the last religion, the last country, the last surviving ideology.” With this line, Song positions love as the final sacred frontier. She proposes a definition of love as the last intact ritual in a post-structural world where the unexplainable has been demystified and sanitized by nihilism, and heartbreak has become a foregone conclusion. But it is the film’s insistence that love cannot be planned nor forced nor manufactured that paradoxically offers relief. As frustrating as it is to hear that “love will find you when you least expect it,” it is precisely the act of acknowledging one’s own lack of control over the elusive enterprise of romance that frees one from the impossible pressure of “getting it right.” Love blooms and when it does, it requires seeing directly without mirrors, without rose-tinted filters, without limerence-ridden fantasies.

Love is understanding, and understanding transcends measured value. Value is transactional. Understanding is given without expectation. Understanding is the beginning of a radical love unencumbered by capitalistic checkboxes and definitions of worth. After all, it is largely the worship of the constructed deities of money (metaphorically enshrined in NYC as the center of American financial power) that have shifted definitions of “love” to a business casual kind of “value”—a what’s-in-it-for-me kind of mentality. And so, the pursuit of money and status is revealed to be the ultimate navel-gazing mirror, a system set up to assign worth based on assets, including the people around you. This is the thesis of Materialists: Love is not a process of projecting, brokering, or even settling. Like the concept of God, it simply is.

Devin Glenn holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Humanities and International Cinema Studies from Brigham Young University and an M.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Southern California.