Materialists | Film Review

Jun 13

I caught the film Materialists on opening night, and judging by the packed theater, I wasn’t the only one craving a real romantic movie amidst the 2025 swamp of IP-driven spectacle.

This film, starring Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans, delivers a simple story well told. It’s intimate, stylish, and emotionally sincere. Johnson plays a 35-year-old matchmaker with measured nuance, and Evans, charm turned all the way up, plays a waiter with aspirations beyond his station. It’s a wry commentary about online dating culture, where people are caricatured by their height, age, income, and photogenic qualities.

As a creative professional and movie lover, I couldn’t help noticing where the film soared, and where it stumbled. The strongest elements were the leads themselves. Their chemistry carries the film, and the early scenes are buoyed by great dialogue, elegant locations, and an upscale, New York-in-a-fantasy-world aesthetic. But as the film moved toward its final act, something shifted.

Despite the lavish interiors and gorgeous set dressing, the world began to feel oddly empty. Too many emotionally intense scenes were confined to polished, echoey rooms with no background action. There was no movement, no energy. It started to feel like two people in a soundproof studio, not two people navigating real life. The production design, though beautiful, became static. And that lack of lived-in detail drained some of the film’s emotional momentum.

Even the audio leaned too heavily into silence. Whispered intimacy is powerful, but without enough contrasting ambient sound, musical counterpoint, the friction of the world, it starts to feel sluggish. The biggest fail came toward the end of movie, when the 44-year-old Evans does a heartfelt monologue about being a 37-year-old washout. Since he’s one of our biggest stars and his age is well-known, claiming to be almost a decade younger radically undercut the film’s underlying storyline about being authentic in an ageist, beauty-driven culture.

Still, I think Materialists fills a crucial gap in the market. There are so few date movies these days. Films that aren’t animated or fueled by superhero lore. This one offered that experience: attractive people falling in love in stylish places. It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s trying to remind us why we liked the wheel in the first place.

I’d argue there’s a massive opportunity here. Romantic storytelling is timeless, but we need to evolve how it's produced. Add texture. Let the world breathe. And stop underestimating audiences: they’ll absolutely show up for grounded stories with emotional honesty and visual movement.

This one was good. With a few small shifts, it could’ve been great.

Ian Maisel

When I was in high school I worked as a movie theater projectionist, acted in my school plays, and published a series of autobiographical comic books that I sold at music and bookstores. I’ve always loved entertainment, and at Brown University I double majored in Visual Arts and Modern European History because the history teachers told the best stories.

My career began at an artificial intelligence startup company where I worked as a graphic designer and animator creating 3D avatars for virtual personalities. I used a program called Poser that was kind of like a Barbie Dream House for cartoons. My comic illustrations were published in the international edition of Time magazine.

In 2006, I completed a graduate Certificate of Publishing and Communications at Harvard University, where I studied creative writing, acting, and media production. I auditioned for the student theater and was cast in a high-brow Chekhov play and a low-brow undergraduate comedy where I played a California high school guitarist like Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

At Boston College I continued developing my career as a graphic designer and went on to work as an animator at a Jewish nonprofit. In 2008 I left Boston to chase the California dream. I got a job in San Francisco as a litigation graphics specialist for intellectual property attorneys, and I worked on some high-stakes legal trials where I barely slept for a week!

After five years I transitioned into the corporate world and worked as a contract presentation designer at Visa and Bare Minerals. I enjoyed collaborating with senior executives to bring their ideas to life through graphic storytelling and large-scale event presentations. One of my highlights was getting to opportunity to produce an in-house interview with the supermodel Christy Turlington!

In 2017 I took on my first Senior Designer role at Alexandria Real Estate, where I designed high-end investor presentations and art directed photoshoots for major tech companies including Facebook, Google, and Pinterest. The following year I flew out to LA to study video production, and went on to create a digital signage content management system for Alexandria’s 60+ high-tech office buildings across the country.

In 2020 I expanded my focus into social media by producing a video advertising campaign that launched a Visa executive’s speaking career by generating 30,000 social media engagements in five months. Since then I’ve continued designing creative presentations, producing videos, and writing social media campaigns for a wide range of brands including the University of San Francisco and Meta. I love working with high-performance creative teams on exciting projects and enjoy utilizing my creative background to work at the intersection of design, entertainment, and culture.

https://www.ianmaisel.com

Materialists | Film Review

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