‘After the Hunt’ Is Too Smart to Be This Dumb

Light-headed when it should be deeply heady, After the Hunt is a post-#MeToo brew of toxic masculinity careening into catty feminism, and of white entitlement head-butting woke entitlement. It’s a he-said/she-said jumble that plays far better as a knowing parody than a tsk-tsk tragedy. Maestro Luca Guadagnino is smarter and slyer than this cerebral hemorrhage of a melodrama, which splashes loudly in the shallow end of a very deep intellectual pool. Alchemically, and against the odds, the Italian auteur nonetheless uses his sensual direction and unlikely romanticism to elevate an otherwise leaden mess that leans on its story’s illustrious college campus to add substance by association.

Setting a film at Yale does not automatically make this elitist probe an elite achievement. Mad respect, though, to any modern-day Hollywood film (starring Julia Roberts, no less) which name-checks Hegel, Freud, and Nietzsche, along with Foucault’s power structures, Jung’s Elektra Complex and Arendt’s Ulysses Paradox. After the Hunt doesn’t elaborate on very many of these great minds, but at least it presents characters in thrall to their ideas — the product of an overly ambitious script that clearly reveres the high-minded thoughts of higher education.

Title ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Written by: Nora Garrett
Starring: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny
Running time: 139 mins

The Ivy Leaguers in question are popular philosophy professors Alma Imhoff (Roberts) and Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), an icy Gen Xer and a louche Millennial, the kind of cool teachers who spoon on the couch during a campus soirée at Alma’s preposterously luxe apartment and swig wine while being keenly condescending. “Your generation is so…tight,” Hank laughs at the students nervously shuffle in their seats.

Alma and Hank enjoy their cozy platonic relationship while both are thirstily vying for the same tenured position. Alma’s sassy psychologist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a haughty kind-of-cuck in a frigid marriage who likes to stir the pot when he’s not whipping up a cassoulet, archly wonders aloud if the tenure track will destroy Alma and Hank’s too-tight friendship. No worries there, since something else completely derails their handsy amity: sexual assault accusations from Alma’s try-hard protegée, prickly grad student Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri).

One rainy night, Alma finds Maggie, crouched and shaking outside her apartment door. She tells Alma, without exactly specifying, that Hank “crossed a line” with her. Alma, hiding secrets of her own, acts aloof and guarded. And so begins a weeklong process in which Alma’s professional life slowly unwinds while her personal relationships go through a stress test of seismic proportions.

Hank is a “straight white cis man,” in one socio-clinical estimation, while Maggie is an African American lesbian dating a nonbinary classmate. She is also the daughter of billionaire parents who have heavily endowed Yale over the years. Cue the maelstrom of rage-bait intersectionality that swirls around these hyper-academic thoroughbreds, with Alma caught on the back foot and in the crossfire. Among the petty accusations of “exploiting this shallow cultural moment” and “tokenistic subjugation,” flashes of truth emerge from flawed people lost in true pain. “What’s being alive, when your livelihood is taken from you?” one says with defeated clarity.

What gives After the Hunt a soupçon of substance is the film’s 2025 distance from the white-hot fireball of #MeToo accusations that swirled in their late-2010s prime. When Alma says “if it’s real to you, then it’s real,” the line here is less confessional than it is calculated. And one success of the script is that our allegiance keeps shifting as to who the victim really is — especially after Alma reveals a sexual incident from her own past that destroyed people in its wake.

Further redeeming the flawed film is the fact that Guadagnino really isn’t concerned with vindicating either Hank or Maggie. He’s much more focused on their scandal’s fallout, as it tangentially pertains to Alma, and even more specifically how it unexpectedly cracks open her marriage. Suddenly Frederik, the film’s most insufferable person, who blares music with nerve-shredding hostility and trades loaded barbs with bitchy aplomb, becomes its most empathetic star. By the end he is beautifully vulnerable and absolutely bereft of the pretension he wears as armor, his quiet suffering transmogrified into the one thing the film most sorely lacks: true love.