Not that long ago the world of dating was purely organic, whereby you would meet someone at a bar, at a party or club, or even in a cafe, and something would just...click.

Of course the dating game has since gone digital, in fact mostly relying on one digit to find love, an index finger, as it endures the endless carousel of swiping left or right.

This is South Korean director Celine Song’s follow up to her 2023 critically acclaimed debut Pas t Lives, taking a very modern look at the world of dating.

Looking for love in NYC is Lucy (Dakota Johnson). She isn’t looking for herself however, as it’s her job to find it for others, working as she does for Adore, an exclusive matchmaking service.

But in this modern world, with only rich clients on their books, love isn’t high on their criteria, with the likes of height, hair, good looks and, more importantly, income, are all higher priorities.

It’s a different world from when she was dating in her youth, a young aspiring actor named John (Chris Evans), who she just so happens to bump into at an event she’s attending that he’s working at.

It’s also the same event where she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a handsome, successful gentleman in the world of finance, who in her business is known as a unicorn. But when she approaches him with her business card, he’s more interested in her, which puts her own dating ethics to the test.

You would think that the casting of Johnson, Evans and Pascal would make for an entertaining rom-com, but Song’s latest film is anything but. In fact, it could probably be best described as an anti-rom-com.

It is a hot take on the current dating scene, particularly amongst the wealthy, who are all about ticking boxes. It’s similar to the algorithm that all the dating apps use, which turns love into an equation, matching up all those ticked boxes for the perfect match.

But if anyone who has been on those dating apps will know all too well is that maths really doesn’t know that much about love.

And the same can be said for this film, that is lacking just what those apps do, the human touch. It is a cold, heartless look at dating, which may well be a savvy snapshot of society today, but it makes for a rather cold film.

It should be stated clearly that Song, who also wrote the film, had no intentions of making a rom-com, so it’s not as if she’s misleading her audience, but it wouldn’t have hurt to have had a few hints of both.

Take Johnson, whose role is all too robotic, as if she herself were synthetic, which perhaps would have made for an interesting twist if she were, like a dating version of Blade Runner.

Her role relies on a key moment in the film, when something goes wrong between a date she has brokered, that affects her emotionally. Unfortunately this moment is handled in a clunky fashion, pointing blame where it really shouldn’t be blamed. But Song runs with it regardless, which gives the film a massive flaw.

Some of the dialogue is interesting, but nothing more than that, with the sense that it feels like it’s far cleverer than it really is. But again like an app, it lacks emotion, perhaps deliberately so, but for the film’s sake it just needed a lighter touch.

Again, even though you get the impression that the film thinks it’s a smart look at modern dating, it then resorts to a predictable outcome that you can see coming for a mile.

If there were an app that offered potential films for you to watch, initially at least Materialists would offer a lot of potential, but after spending time with it, you know you really should have swiped left.