For a while, I thought the romantic comedy had lost its way. Just thinned out. Softened into the kind of film that coasts on charm and nostalgia rather than tension or interiority. All glossy New York real estate, no emotional scaffolding. A genre built less on longing and more on tropes we’ve learned to predict within minutes. The formula wasn’t broken, but it felt tired. And then I watched Materialists by Celine Song.

The premise of the film is deceptively simple. A woman is caught between two men. One brings financial ease, while the other is shrouded in ambiguity. It sounds familiar, but Materialists is not so invested in resolution, or even in redemption. Instead, it circles around a more pressing question: What kind of life are you building, and who is going to fit best within that structure?

Song’s work resists fantasy. There are no wide-eyed heroines here, no fate-drenched meet-cutes or final acts sealed with rain. Her characters are already formed. The women in her worlds know themselves. They’re not looking to be chosen. They’re deciding what, and who, is worth choosing. The tension resides in how much of themselves they are willing to compromise. How much they are willing to obscure in the name of romance. This clarity is what has prompted many to label Song the modern-day answer to Nora Ephron. The writer who gave us some of the greatest rom-coms of the early 2000s– You've got Mail and When Harry Met Sally – that today we still re-watch and say are our favourites within the genre.

It’s a tempting comparison. Both work with dialogue as structure. Both understand that the most revealing moments are often the quietest; the things we say when we’re trying not to be vulnerable. But where Ephron gave us destiny, Song gives us decisions. Her protagonists are not stumbling toward romantic fulfilment. They are weighing up lives. Not just between two men, but two value systems. One man might offer security, the other something more complex and less legible.

Neither option is a fairytale. And crucially, neither is wrong.

This theme of negotiating between passion and pragmatism can also be seen echoed in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. Though not a rom-com in the traditional sense, it shares the genre’s preoccupation with desire, longing, and the push-pull of attraction shown through the intense pressure of competitive sport. Zendaya’s character isn’t caught in a love triangle so much as she is the mastermind of it, conducting power dynamics with the precision of a coach setting plays. There’s sex, of course, and rivalry, but also strategy, ambition, and a lot of control. And what makes this feel like a romantic comedy, is its lack of a resolution. Instead, it offers a sustained tension and eroticism. It’s about attraction as game, and love as something you don’t just fall into, but fight for.

Song's earlier film Past Lives offered a more meditative take on similar themes. Lives that run in parallel. Love that arrives too late. Emotional loyalty that does not demand action. It felt spiritually aligned with Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, another film that reframed the romantic comedy not as a genre of conclusion, but of complication. Both gave us heroines who did not choose between lovers so much as between versions of themselves. They left us suspended not in heartbreak, but in possibility.

But Materialists feels different. It is sharper. More present. It captures something about where we are now. In 2025, romance is no longer just about feeling. It is also about logistics. It is about ambition. Politics. Compatibility. Class. Timing. Aesthetics. The rom-com has grown up.

It no longer promises that love is the answer to everything. Instead, it asks what love might cost, and whether we still want to pay for it.

That cost, and the mechanics of negotiating it, are being interrogated not only on screen but behind the scenes too. Recently, Dakota Johnson revealed she had worked with her first intimacy coordinator on a film – yes, the same Dakota Johnson who starred in three Fifty Shades of Grey adaptations. She described the experience as “not sexy” but “really cool” in an interview with Deadline; a shift away from the intuitive, sometimes chaotic sets of her early career. In contrast, Mikey Madison, star of Sean Baker’s Oscar-winning Anora, chose to not have an intimacy coordinator altogether, stating it was “decided that it would be best just to keep it small. We were able to streamline it, shoot it super quickly." She added, "It was a choice that I made."

These different approaches speak to a broader recalibration in cinema. Once, the most charged scenes were also the most unscripted. Now, intimacy is planned, protected, rehearsed. The charge is in the care. And as audiences become more attuned to what happens behind the camera – through press tours and social media – that shift is becoming part of the viewing experience. Transparency around how intimacy is created doesn’t break the illusion. It deepens the trust. The new erotic isn’t just about what we see on screen, but how it gets there.

Which is what makes the modern rom-com so compelling.

There are no airport chases. No third-act declarations in the rain. The film isn’t interested in spectacle, it’s interested in structure.

In the architecture of relationships, of ambition, of the rooms we build around ourselves and the people we let inside. Song shoots intimacy like strategy, framing desire not as chaos, but as control. Each glance, each silence, is deliberate.

This is the rom-com stripped of illusion. The question is no longer, “Will they end up together?” but “What does together even look like?” In that way, Materialists doesn’t just belong to the rom-com tradition, it subverts it entirely. It is both commentary and evolution. Romance is still there and has to be, but it’s surrounded by the mess of modernity with class, aesthetics, timing, self-actualisation. Love is no longer the climax.

It's the modern rom-coms like this don’t just make us feel, they let us sit in it, to think. The ache, the impulse, the why. Because the best ones aren’t just about falling in love. They’re about noticing what that love asks of us in the bigger picture. And as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice once said, "What are men to rocks and mountains?".

Feature image via IMDb.