Review: AFTER THE HUNT

 by Rob DiCristino

Luca Guadagnino is back with another mixed bag!

“Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable,” reads the poster for Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt. To his credit, the Italian auteur wastes no time trying to fulfill that promise: His film opens on stark white credits against a black background. The lead actors are listed in alphabetical order. The typeset is Windsor Light. Yup, it’s the Woody Allen font. Does that make you uncomfortable? The story concerns a white male professor (Andrew Garfield) who’s accused of sexually assaulting a black, queer, female student (Ayo Edebiri), a scandal that finds their mutual mentor (Julia Roberts) and her husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) caught in the crossfire. Can you handle that, snowflake? Nora Garrett’s screenplay targets wokeness, #MeToo, and cancel culture, with shots aimed at the kind of “performative discontent” that so many Zoomers seem to have taken up as a full-time vocation. Is that just absolutely blowing your mind? Yes, armed with a political acuity straight out of 2012, After the Hunt is every bit as canny and insightful as it sounds.

Professor Alma Imhoff (Roberts) seems to have everything she’s ever wanted: Adored by her students and speeding down the tenure track with smug, self-satisfied glee, the Yale philosophy guru distracts herself from work on an alleged manuscript with droll lectures and posh dinner parties where her most ardent acolytes — including Maggie Resnick (Edebiri), whose family contributions to the university would earn her a seat at the table regardless of her intellect — compete for stray crumbs of her favor. They’re also a great opportunity for her to get drunk with Hank Gibson (Garfield), a charming colleague whose persistent flirtations would bother Alma’s husband, Frederik (Stuhlbarg), were Frederik still under the delusion that his wife desired him at all. No, Frederik’s not the jealous type, but he does find his wife’s tendency to collect unremarkable students like Maggie a tad narcissistic. “Is she great, or does she just think you’re great?” he asks, a cutting question that’s answered when Maggie comes to Alma with a chilling report of Hank’s sexual abuse.

But is Maggie telling the truth? Is she, as Hank insists, just distracting from the fact that he caught her plagiarizing her dissertation? After the Hunt doesn’t actually give a shit, focusing instead on a he-said-she-said that exacerbates the already-simmering resentments between Yale’s Gen X faculty and the whiny, entitled, solipsistic students — as described by Dr. Kim Sayers (an underused Chloë Sevigny) — they’re educating. In truth, everyone’s a little bit guilty: Alma’s initial response to Maggie’s claim is a mix of victim-blaming and equivocation that not only forces Maggie to go to the campus newspaper with her story but also betrays Alma’s allegiance to a patriarchal structure that only allows women to advance if they’ve endured the proper amount of suffering. Hank admits to drinking too much that night, sure, but there’s a devious undercurrent of opportunity in his subsequent diatribe against cancel culture that suggests he’s finally found the cause célèbre he’s been looking for. And then there’s Maggie, almost certainly a victim but almost certainly also milking that victimhood to reassert a privileged position that she’d never be able to maintain through merit alone.

But whereas Todd Field’s magnificent Tár gave its embattled protagonist a delightful, pathological arrogance for the world to weaponize against her, After the Hunt’s cast is made up of shallow caricatures, little else than mouthpieces for Obama-era (era) takes that feel tragically quaint in 2025. For most of the film, Alma’s motivations can only be guessed at between rounds of vino — take a shot every time someone finishes a glass, and you’ll be on the floor well before After the Hunt’s bloated runtime concludes — and passive-aggressive sparring matches with Frederik. A late reveal regarding her own past accusations against powerful men is both thuddingly obvious and completely superfluous, a waste of narrative resources that would have been better spent exploring the romantic tension between her and Maggie. But no, that would be too authentically provocative for Garrett’s screenplay, which ultimately amounts to a glib junk drawer of clichès and oversimplifications that unwittingly embody the very sociological ignorance that Zoomers have been forced to call out.

It’s a shame because Julia Roberts is spectacular in After the Hunt, turning in the kind of career reinvigorating performance that some of her contemporaries — Angelina Jolie’s Maria and Pamela Anderson’s The Last Showgirl come to mind — have been pawing at unsuccessfully over the last few years. She and Andrew Garfield, especially, understand that Guadagnino’s camera is essentially a sensual instrument, and the stray insert shots of hands and faces Luca allows himself here and there hint at the sexual ferocity that made Call Me by Your Name and Challengers such slutty extravaganzas. Luca seems committed to keeping it in his pants this time around — perhaps the pushback from last year’s more explicit Queer was too much to stomach — but After the Hunt is exactly the sort of dry, didactic story that could have used an enthusiastic crank on the ol’ horny lever. Instead, Luca reaches for a murky ambiguity that his maximalist instincts just can’t support, delivering a film almost prudish in its refusal to engage with any of the ideas or images it promises at the start.

After the Hunt hits NY and LA theaters on October 10th, expanding wide in the US on October 17th.