When you have such attractive players as Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans looking for love against the gleaming backdrop of modern-day New York — well, you’ve entered rom-com heaven, right?

Not exactly. “Materialists,” Celine Song’s sophomore effort after her quietly breathtaking 2023 debut, “Past Lives,” winds up turning romance on its head to explore some of its unseemliest unspoken truths. Maybe “Materialists” marks the emergence of a new genre: the rom-con, not in the sense that it’s against the vicarious pleasures of flirting, seduction and finally finding true love, but that it’s painfully aware of the coldhearted calculation that so often lies beneath.

Johnson plays Lucy, a Manhattan matchmaker who works for a bespoke dating service called Adore — a concierge service for people who realize that to meet The One, they’ll have to get off their apps and into the real world. Lucy has nine marriages to her credit, making her the office GOAT; but true to this story’s Austen-meets-the-algorithm milieu, she has reconciled herself to eternal singledom. At the wedding of her most recent satisfied client, Lucy meets a handsome financier named Harry (Pascal), a guy who is so tall, good-looking and rich, rich, rich that he’s a matchmaker’s unicorn. He checks all the boxes.

While Lucy is busy flipping through her mental Rolodex to find Harry a suitable mate, he makes it known that he only has eyes for her; meanwhile, a cater-waiter at the reception turns out to be an old flame of Lucy’s: John (Evans), a wannabe actor who is tall, good-looking and poor, poor, poor. Can this marriage be saved? And which marriage, exactly, are we rooting for?

Song clearly has a lot on her mind in “Materialists,” which often plays as a meta-critique of such consumerist fantasies as “Sex and the City.” At the aforementioned wedding, Lucy’s client suffers a case of pre-altar jitters, which Lucy assuages by reminding her why she’s marrying her future husband. Yes, he’s wealthy and promises a lifetime of material security, but the psychic currency in the transaction is profound and even defensible: “He makes you feel valued,” Lucy tells her simply.

That’s an astute point, and exemplifies the kind of nuance Song seeks to bring to “Materialists,” which beneath the glittering surface wrestles with the grubby realities of money, social status, looks-ism and outright cruelty. (One of Lucy’s male clients blithely insists that 30 is a “dealbreaker” when it comes to age, 20 when it comes to body-mass index.) Grazing in a field similar to the ones plowed by Ruben Östlund’s scorching 2022 satire “Triangle of Sadness,” as well as the razor-sharp relationship dramas of Nicole Holofcener, Song isn’t interested in demonizing the most superficial checklists people bring to their dating lives as much as understanding the primal needs and aspirations those lists represent.

“Materialists” sets out to confront taboos like commodification, class and self-deception. But in dismantling the classic wish-fulfillment fantasy, it indulges in some of it, too: There’s something deliciously meta about Johnson — whose breakout role was in the swoony, S-and-M-adjacent “Fifty Shades of Grey” — waking up in yet another bed of an impossibly prosperous, handsome man. By now, though, the onetime ingenue has become a producer in her own right, including of a perceptive documentary about the sex researcher Shere Hite, and Johnson brings all of that intelligence to a canny and sensitive performance. (Pascal and Evans are similarly appealing, bringing the right amount of self-doubt and spiky anger to their respective characters.)

Perhaps it’s inevitable that, like the flawed people at its center, “Materialists” doesn’t check every box: Too often, Song’s protagonists sound like they’re stand-ins for the director rather than voicing fully realized characters. “Past Lives” wasn’t afraid of negative space — between people, and the words they say — but what felt delicately naturalistic in that film too often feels forced and rhythmically awkward when the narrative goes from low-key to no-key.

“Materialists” is being marketed as a pretty, escapist romp when it’s anything but: A jarring tonal shift midway through the movie introduces an even grimmer note by reminding viewers of the serious perils of dating culture. That zag leads to some reckonings — moral, ethical, romantic, narrative — that can’t help but feel predictable and contrived. Still, at its most commendable, “Materialists” lends them the tarnished glow of humanity at its most imperfectly ragged.

“Only connect,” E.M. Forster told us. The struggle continues. And through Song’s distinctive lens, it looks ruthless, a little bit funny and all too real.

Three stars. Rated R. At theaters. Contains profanity and brief sexual material. 109 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.