Materialists is Horror, Not Rom-Com
Red State Blue Balls #20
This week’s post includes some light spoilers for the film Materialists.
“This is not a rom-com,” I whispered to my sister halfway through Materialists last Saturday night. “There’s no rom or com.”
“This is us,” she whispered back.
Materialists is us. By which my sister meant, this is modern dating. This is our personal dystopia within our national dystopia within our global dystopia: a world where men only want women under 30 with BMIs under 20 and women only want rich men at least 6 feet tall. (According to a recent episode of the Liz Moody Podcast in which she discusses Materialists with dating expert Logan Ury, only 14% of men are at least 6 feet tall.)
Afterwards, as my sister dropped me off at home, I said it again: “That was not a rom-com. That was a horror movie.” And then I googled to see if anyone online thought the same thing because this is 2025. GQ and Vanity Fair had similar takes, and I’m sure a million other people did too. Those takes seemed akin to my sister’s: the real horror is modern dating.
But I was horrified by something else in Materialists.