New Delhi, June 17 -- "Are we in the right film?" a girl in the row behind me asked her friend. You could see why she'd be confused. They'd turned up for a New York romance with Pedro Pascal and here was an unkempt man wearing animal hide handing a bouquet to a woman in front of a cave. He puts a ring fashioned out of single flower on her finger. The title drops and then we're in New York, watching Lucy (Dakota Johnson) get ready for another day as an in-demand matchmaker.

The opening of Materialists yearns to be the deer in the snow in Ildikó Enyedi's On Body and Soul (2017). But this is an American film, so poetic animal metaphors are out. The question remains: why does Celine Song's film-which insists throughout that marriage is ...