After the Hunt

Director Luca Guadagnino’s exceptional and dramatically charged double features from last year, Challengers and Queer, were both skillfully made films that didn’t quite get the year-end movie push as they deserved, resulting in major subs for both films. Now Guadagnino is back with another year-end film with hopes of being an awards movie, but its underwhelming, low-down content with mixed results guarantees very little momentum this awards season. It’s actually a very well-acted and engrossing movie. With an original screenplay by Nora Garrett, the film also feels like a ripped-from-the-headlines movie, as the film tells the story of a middle-aged, sophisticated philosophy teacher at Yale University, Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts),who finds herself at a crossroads after her protege and ace student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), makes an accusation of sexual assault against one of her colleagues, Henrik “Hank” Gibson (Andrew Garfield), which can reveal a dark secret to Alma’s past.

Alma attempts to be objective, and she refuses to take sides, and she listens to both sides of the story between Hank and Maggie. The film consciously never resorts to Rashomon flashbacks as you would expect. Instead, Guadagnino uses the actors’ convictions in their testimonials and allows the audience to come to their conclusions until the reveal at the end that feels underwritten and forced. Objectively, for Alma, ends up getting sidelined as she feels more partial towards Hank. At first, Alma feels sympathy for Maggie. Hank instantly loses his job, and we see how the accusations are politicized by campus students and faculty. Alma eventually begins to become more partial to Hank, which causes tension between Maggie and Alma. It’s left ambiguous in the film why Alma takes Hank’s side. Her psychiatrist husband, Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg), certainly believes Hank. Especially during a very memorable moment in the film where Alma is invited to dinner and Maggie refuses to participate in Hank’s passive-aggressive questions about her studies. With amusement, Frederick dismisses himself from dinner and deliberately disrupts Alma and Maggie’s conversation as he plays music loudly and nonchalantly walks in and out from the kitchen to the living room. Alma’s tutor, student liaison, and close friend Dr. Kim Sayers (Chloë Sevigny), is also distant of Hank. She aids and consults Maggie, only to find out during a drink with Alma that she holds her own judgments on Maggie and her generations work ethic as they ironically drink in a bar on campus.

Courtesy Amazon MGM

Alma is certainly drawn to Maggie’s victimization, but it also ends up being a linchpin for Maggie’s own bias against Alma. She feels Alma is using it as leverage to weed out Hank from the school so she can gain sympathy to fulfill her own academic career. Hank informs Alma at lunch that she plagiarizes her thesis and that she is a very deceptive person. This causes more distrust between Alma and Maggie, in which Alma already holds her own personal bias on her generation that she feels is entitled and oversensitive. Once Alma discovers that Maggie knows her dark secret from her, it becomes a cat-and-mouse psychological game between the two that will certainly disrupt ambitions and potentially dismantle careers. Guadagnino and Garrett certainly deliver their own provocations on the MeToo movement, but they don’t allow themselves to give the film a full, untethered welter into its commentary.

The film’s third act and reveal explain Maggie’s motivation, but it feels contrived, and the payoff comes off hollow and not as complex as it builds itself up to be. Julia Roberts, who has spent a majority of her career working on studio movies and rom coms with an occasional fearless performance from great directors like Mike Nichols’s Closer, delivers an exceptional performance. She piles on enough sophistication and complexity for the role, stifling her dramatic spark (Closer remains her most wrenching performance to date.) But the spot-on performances don’t make up for the subpar writing that feels marginally effective by the time the film’s payoffs begin to roll out.

Courtesy Amazon MGM

The film thinks it’s an unapologetically lurid dive into institutional misogyny, trauma, and the MeToo movement, but it’s not handled delicately or genuinely. It feels more like a provocation than an examination with underwritten motivations and tacked-on plotting. Maggie’s trauma and race are downplayed all to make an overstated point on white privilege. A lot of the drama spirals into melodrama that becomes inert, especially with Garfield’s monologue of proclaiming his innocence, which comes off very overwrought. We never quite feel Maggie’s alienation the way Eva Victor did so well with her character in the vastly superior Sorry, Baby, which covers very familiar ground with more emotional richness and authenticity.

Ayo Edebiri’s desperations feel conflicting; she makes her characters’ vulnerabilities palatable, but the writing makes her a stereotypical Gen-Zer who is in a relationship with a non-binary character that feels tacked on, along with her not putting as much effort into her dissertations. It’s certainly the point of the characterization, but the character feels more like an automated afterthought. Making matters even worse in the script is Garfield’s character. Garfield, usually a great go-to actor who holds emotional distress from his own circumstances, is disappointingly one-note here. Ironically, the performance actually probably could have been more effective if they didn’t try to humanize him. Guadagnino has never been low on subtlety; After the Hunt is nevertheless very flawed and entertaining in a way you might not want to admit to. I know Guadagnino and Nora Garrett all thought they were making a film with timely commentary, but their own self-seriousness and undeveloped script end up making their own commentary feel like a severe downgrade that is severely downplayed. It’s still worth watching due to Guadagnino’s directing skills and Julia Roberts superlative performance.

AFTER THE HUNT is now playing in limited theaters.