Materialists opens during the Paleolithic period of the Stone Age. A caveman brings tools and flowers to the woman he loves, hoping it’ll be enough to earn her affection. We may think that love gets purer the further you go back in time, but there has always been a business angle. Dowries, negotiations, and aligning kingdoms are the old ways of forming a union. Now there’s an algorithm for that, loaded with statistics like height, income, and political views. And for those that are more serious (or desperate) and have the funds to do so, there are services like Adore, which will assign a personal matchmaker to search for you.

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is one of those matchmakers, and a damn good one to be specific. She’s responsible for nine marriages, salvaging the most recent one by spinning the bride’s cold feet confession that part of the reason she’s marrying the groom is because it makes her sister jealous into a lesson about finding value and feeling valued. The key to her success is to treat dating as a business venture, using the same calculating mindset you’d find on Wall Street. “Market forces,” “competitive advantage,” and “strategic skills” are her phrases of choice. The results speak for themselves, and there’s no denying that this is the path that the dating landscape is rapidly progressing along.

It’s natural and odd that after writer/director Celine Song tenderly explored the concept of destiny and love in Past Lives, her follow-up takes a cold, hard look at the facts. There isn’t going to be a Prince Charming waiting in the wings, or a Cinderella that perfectly fits the glass slipper. Dating is a trial-and-error endeavor, with adaptability and compromise being the most important qualities. Song makes sure there are a lot of laughs to be had with all this nonsense. Lucy’s customers are demanding, neurotic, and impatient. A potential match must be this tall, be in this age range, like these certain songs/movies, and make at least this amount of money. Living in the Midwest all my life certainly didn’t prepare me for the astronomical figures that people expect to receive on the East Coast. But all of this is funny because they’re saying the quiet parts out loud, and deep down, we all know we do it too.

The eternal bachelorette who has a knack for helping others find love is a trope as old as the romantic dramedy itself. Song may know how to reexamine it in the ways I just described, but she also knows how to harness its extremely potent traditional qualities. She also knows how to best steer the performers on all sides of this love triangle. Yes, Lucy gets more than she bargains for when she simultaneously finds affection in two separate places. Johnson is perpetually on a pendulum swinging back and forth. And after the swing (and miss) that was Madame Web, she was due for a major slide to the lighter side.

We meet Pedro Pascal’s Harry as he charms his way through his brother’s wedding reception. He’s also obscenely rich, tall, and handsome. He’s what Lucy refers to as a “unicorn” in her line work - the man of every woman’s dreams. John (Chris Evans) has some of those qualities, but definitely not the financial ones. He’s your usual struggling actor with a part-time catering job who lives in a shitty apartment. But he’s real, and there’s a reason Lucy and he were together for five years before they broke up. We’ve seen characters with these archetypes before, but here they’re steeped in enough authenticity so you can’t just immediately pick a side.

Materialists can also be too honest for its own good. There’s a darker element that gets introduced later in the story that drives part of Lucy’s decision-making about her personal life. Song handles it to the best of her ability, but its inclusion is habitually distracting from the other excellent qualities. Honesty is still the best policy, and Song continues to show that she’s a master of telling us how it is in the ways we want to hear it.