5 movies to watch if you liked Materialists

If The Materialists left you emotionally wrecked, you’re not alone. Celine Song’s latest endeavor gives the rom-com a sly, cerebral twist, delivering heartbreak, class tension, and chemistry so palpable it practically sweats off the screen. Set in the shimmering world of NYC’s elite matchmakers, it’s a story about wanting love and luxury... and wondering if you can have both without selling your soul. If you fell in love with Dakota Johnson's stellar screen presence, the heated chemistry between her and the two leading men - Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal - then you might be craving more.

Here are five films to turn to after watching The Materialists that will leave you equally wrecked.

Past Lives (2023)

If you're craving some more Celine Song, then Past Lives should be your next watch. Song's debut film is a haunting meditation on fate, longing, and the people we might have been. Drawing from the Korean concept of inyeon, the idea that relationships are the result of countless past-life connections, the film follows Nora and Hae Sung, childhood friends separated by immigration, who reconnect decades later. The emotional charge between them is undeniable, but the timing? Impossibly off. What follows is an aching conversation about what could have been, and what could never be.

Much like The Materialists, Past Lives isn’t interested in easy answers. Both films explore love as a negotiation between desire and circumstance. In Past Lives, it’s distance and destiny. In The Materialists, it’s class and compromise. Yet, both center on women caught between two worlds, torn between what the heart wants and what reality has in store. Celine Song uses quiet spaces, lingering silences, and razor-sharp dialogue to dissect identity, ambition, and emotional loyalty. The characters don’t simply fall in love; they reckon with it, question it, and carry its weight like a memory they can’t quite shake.

If The Materialists made you ache in that strangely satisfying way, Past Lives will wreck you gently, and you’ll thank it for the emotional bruises.

Available to watch on: Prime Video

We Live In Time (2024)

We Live in Time doesn’t just tell a love story, it rewinds it. The film peels back the layers of a relationship in reverse, showing us the endings before the beginnings, the heartbreak before the highs. Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield bring a kind of bruised tenderness to their characters, navigating joy and grief like it’s all happening at once. And really, isn’t that what love feels like?

Just like The Materialists, it’s not about candlelit dinners or grand declarations. It’s about the quiet undoing. The private wars we wage inside ourselves while sharing a life with someone else. Both films explore what it means to be vulnerable when survival means staying guarded. They’re less “will they or won’t they” and more “can they keep loving each other when life starts to bite?”

In The Materialists, Dakota Johnson’s character guards herself with wit and confidence. In We Live in Time, Pugh’s character does it with unflinching defiance and tenderness. Both are women navigating desire and damage. Both invite love, but only on fractured terms.

So if The Materialists left you aching for something raw and ruinous, We Live in Time is the echo. It doesn’t shout, it lingers. Quiet. Sad. Devastatingly alive.

Available to watch on: Prime Video and Apple TV+

Cha Cha Real Smooth

Oh, so you're craving more of Dakota Johnson? We've got you covered! Cha Cha Real Smooth and The Materialists might not look like they belong to the same party, one’s grooving through Jersey bat mitzvahs, the other’s sipping overpriced wine in Manhattan lofts, but emotionally? They’re slow dancing to the same heartbreak anthem.

In Cha Cha Real Smooth, Dakota Johnson’s Domino is a quiet thunder. Composed, elusive, and fragile in ways that echo her portrayal of Lucy in The Materialists. Both women are masterclasses in restraint, carefully built walls, soft eyes, and secrets they almost-but-never-quite tell.

What links the two films is that emotional gray zone they both love to sit in. The Materialists wrestles with class and calculated connection, Lucy measures love against lifestyle. Cha Cha does the same, just from a different angle: what’s love when it’s lopsided? When it’s not about status, but sacrifice?

Neither of the films offers tidy answers. They just ask you to lean in, to the tension, to the silences, to the way Dakota Johnson holds a glance. Both are about love that’s real, raw, and inconvenient. The kind that feels less like a perfect match, and more like a bittersweet maybe.

Available to watch on: Apple TV+

Anyone But You (2023)

On the surface, Anyone But You is all about sunshine and chaos, beachy weddings, petty arguments, and Glen Powell’s megawatt grin. The Materialists, on the other hand, is polished like a Tiffany’s window, full of icy gazes and transactional flirtation. But peel back the aesthetics, and they’re wrestling with the same slippery thing: how do you love someone when you’re terrified of being real?

Both films thrive on that tension between curated identity and messy desire. Bea performs chill girl detachment. Lucy performs Upper East Side perfection. But both are undone by the connection. What begins as pretend, fake dating, and casual matchmaking spirals into something fragile and real. And when it cracks, you feel it.

Available to watch on: Netflix

Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

Crazy Rich Asians is a cinematic fireworks show of old-money mansions, heritage emeralds, and dumpling-making dynasties, but it’s not just a couture catwalk. Beneath the jaw-dropping glam, it’s a surprisingly intimate story about what love looks like when the world expects your heart to come with a bank statement.

Sounds familiar? The Materialists flip the same coin. In Celine Song’s world, love isn’t just romantic, it’s strategic. Lucy, our sharp-tongued matchmaker, knows relationships can be as calculated as stock trades. Like Rachel in Crazy Rich Asians, she navigates a world where handbags speak louder than hearts. In both stories, love isn’t free; it’s priced, polished, and paraded.

But here’s the kicker: neither Rachel nor Lucy caves in. Rachel walks away from a marriage proposal rather than marry into a gilded cage. Lucy, too, learns that Birkin bags can’t buy belongings. Both heroines choose feeling over façade.

Different vibes, sure, The Materialists is all Manhattan minimalism while Crazy Rich Asians is maximalist glamor, but both films prove that love, when stripped of its shine, is still worth choosing.

Available to watch on: Prime Video