‘After The Hunt’ review: Julia Roberts heads Luca Guadagnino’s problematic #MeToo drama

Dir: Luca Guadagnino. US. 2025. 138mins

There are some attention-grabbing concepts in After The Hunt, Luca Guadagnino’s star-studded #MeToo treatise: the corrupting nature of privilege, the pandemic of entitlement, poisonous feminism and the ideological gulf between generations. And the Italian filmmaker is aware of make a good-looking movie, the lofty Ivy League spires of Yale College offering a lavish background for this story of elitism gone bitter. Finally, nevertheless, the movie’s inflated self-importance serves to not solely overwhelm but additionally undermine its finer factors.

Bluntly heavy-handed in its strategy

The movie premieres out of competitors in Venice and continues Guadagnino’s lengthy relationship with the pageant, which has seen 4 of his movies play in competitors together with final 12 months’s Queer. It is a far heavier affair than that florid William S Burroughs adaptation, and in addition lacks the light-footedness of Challengers, the emotional authenticity of Name Me By Your Title or the singular imaginative and prescient of Bones And All. Nonetheless, Guadagnino’s followers are prone to prove in power when the movie releases within the US from October 10 and the UK from October 22, the primary title in a brand new worldwide distribution pact between Amazon MGM and Sony. Awards consideration, notably for performances, may additionally not be out of the query.

It’s 2019, and Yale philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) resides a charmed life. We meet her whereas she is internet hosting a celebration on the spectacular house she shares with husband Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg), throughout which she performs mental tennis together with her colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) and PHD pupil Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). It’s a gap scene seemingly designed to lift the hackles; these characters are held at a deliberate distance as they interact in rapid-fire badinage about Nietzsche and Freud. Actress-turned-screenwriter Nora Garrett means for the viewers to remain firmly on the sidelines of this pompous group, however failing to supply any sympathetic characters is a daring transfer given what comes subsequent.

When Hank provides to stroll Maggie dwelling, we definitely know what’s coming, even when we don’t truly see it occur. However when Maggie confides in Alma about Hank’s assault, Alma fails to reply as anticipated. Involved concerning the influence on her impending tenure, and on her personal difficult historical past with Hank, Alma doesn’t need to get entangled. Positive, she provides phrases of assist to Maggie, however she won’t take any type of significant stand.

Roberts is charming because the conflicted Alma, who slowly begins to unravel, her personal previous traumas making themselves felt (the abdomen ulcers which have her doubled over in ache are quite on-the-nose). She captures the uncomfortable dichotomy between Alma’s phrases and her actions, the exhausting edges of a private ambition which comes above all else. She is a girl who fought exhausting in a person’s world, and doesn’t perceive why the youthful generations ought to count on to have it every other method.

This generational pressure between Alma and Maggie is on the coronary heart of the movie, with neither figuring out talk in a method the opposite can actually hear. There are a whole lot of conversations about cultural moments, advantage ethics, set off warnings and protected areas which have Alma and colleague Kim (an underused Chloe Sevigny) rolling their eyes. “Not every little thing is meant to make you comfy,” snaps Alma; there’s the trace she believes that Maggie, the privileged little one of rich college benefactors, wants a tough dose of actuality.

Whereas Maggie needs to talk her fact, Alma thinks maintaining quiet is the one method to safeguard her future, to keep away from being labelled a “tough girl”. That is, in fact, a resonant cultural reality, however After The Hunt is bluntly heavy-handed in its strategy. There’s additionally a palpable Single White Feminine vibe to the best way wherein Maggie begins to emulate Alma’s gown sense, her mannerisms, which casts some doubt as to her motivations. Guadagnino might need to maintain us guessing about the place precisely the reality lies, however that’s a misguided strategy for this type of story.

Hank, in fact, protests his innocence within the determined, incredulous, self-justifying method that responsible males so usually do, and Garfield is plausible and dedicated in an unforgiving position that turns him into one thing of a cipher. Elsewhere, Stuhlbarg is nice as Alma’s emasculated husband, who takes out his frustrations by enjoying passive-aggressively loud music to rival that in After The Fall.

Cinematography is especially notable, and never simply because it brings DOP Malik Hassan Sayeed (Clockers, Eyes Broad Shut) again to the massive display screen after an extended absence. Sayeed’s digital camera successfully captures the oppressive, nameless areas of the Yale campus (impressively recreated at London’s Shepperton Studios), and utilises off-kilter angles to underscore Alma’s rising detachment. Elsewhere, he frames fingers, eyes, mouths in tight close-up, suggesting that our physique language might betray our true motivations. Common Guadagnino collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross flip in a fractious, uneasy rating whose jazz components recall the work of Woody Allen; a sufferer of cancel tradition additionally provocatively referenced within the movie’s Allenesque opening credit.

“A younger black girl will get assaulted and white folks determine a method to make all of it about them,” complains Maggie close to the movie’s finish. The identical might be stated about After The Hunt which is, in fact, directed by a white man and places itself nicely earlier than any actual and worthwhile dialogue of those deeply advanced points. Whereas it could want to spark debate, the stance it takes on its messaging is troubling – notably given a stapled-on coda that appears to recommend we ought to be placing all of this nonsense behind us.