As in her acclaimed debut feature, 2023’s Past Lives, writer/director Celine Song’s sophomore outing draws on personal experience to inform her gimlet-eyed take on modern dating, love, and marriage. Having briefly worked in the professional matchmaking business, Song incorporates her observations into an incisively funny—though sometimes sad—tale about a sleek, thirtysomething matchmaker torn between a rich, handsome, checks-all-the-boxes Mr. Right and her financially struggling ex-boyfriend.

If this sounds like your standard rom-com, think again. After a bizarre 2001: A Space Odyssey–like opening featuring the courtship of a prehistoric couple (stay through the end credits for a sweet payoff), we meet Lucy (Dakota Johnson) handing a business card to a handsome, well-dressed man she passes on the street. A top performer for the high-end Manhattan matchmaking firm Adore, Lucy is about to celebrate the ninth wedding she has brokered—until the bride’s last-minute doubts nearly cancel the deal. Listening carefully like a psychotherapist, Lucy reassures her client that her fiancé makes her “feel valuable.”

Crisis averted, Lucy returns to the reception to pitch her matchmaking skills to a gaggle of single women before sitting alone at the singles table, where investment banker Harry (a smooth Pedro Pascal), the groom’s brother, joins her. He’s interested in her, not her services—but Lucy only sees a hot prospect for her clients. “You are a unicorn,” she tells Harry. “A 10 out of 10.” Their flirtatious conversation is interrupted when her drink order of Coke and beer is abruptly delivered by Lucy’s waiter/actor ex, John (a scruffy Chris Evans).

With the traditional romantic triangle set in place, Song could have easily made Harry the obnoxious heavy (think Bradley Cooper in Wedding Crashers). But as he pursues Lucy with romantic dinner dates at expensive restaurants, he charms her with his good nature and easy manner when pulling out a credit card. The ultimate aphrodisiac, of course, is his $12 million apartment. (Kudos to production designer Anthony Gasparro and set decorator Amy Beth Silver for the stunning—if impersonal—décor. However, do the rich not own any books?)

Most rom-com heroines never discuss money, but Lucy is obsessed with it. She broke up with John because he was perpetually broke. She uses net worth, along with physical attributes like height (“six inches can add a man’s value in the market”), age, and attractiveness, as tools for calculating potential matches. When she wonders why Harry is with her—since she only makes $80,000—he gently reminds her that he has enough material assets for both of them.

But by reducing dating and love to a series of materialistic boxes to be checked off, Lucy makes a disastrous mistake: She sets up a favorite client, Sophie (a heart-wrenching, scene-stealing Zoë Winters from Succession), on a date with a man who is not what he seems. This darker turn becomes a jarring plot device in the film’s weaker and more conventional rom-com half as Lucy reconsiders her relationship with John, a stereotypical 39-year-old man-child still living with roommates and trying to make it in New York as an actor.

The film—and New York—are lovely to look at, thanks to cinematographer Shabier Kirchner’s golden tones. Daniel Pemberton’s romantic score, tinged with melancholy, offers an effective soundscape. Katina Danabassis’s costumes deftly capture Lucy’s transformation from hard-edged professional matchmaker to a softer woman ready for love.

Yet by casting three actors with conventional movie-star good looks, one wonders if Song has fallen prey to the same shallow, materialistic transactions she critiques, where physical attractiveness matters more than in-depth character development. While Pascal and Evans are fine in their roles, Johnson retains a flat affect that Dorothy Parker might describe as running “the gamut of human emotions from A to B.” The most genuine and true-to-life character is Sophie. Still, there are plenty of pleasures to be found in Song’s witty—if uneven—script about the perils of modern love.