After the Hunt is less of a hot pursuit and more of a slow jog

Despite a promising cast and seemingly unique approach to an overdone premise, After the Hunt treats its audience as if they’ve never seen a movie before

Warning: This review contains spoilers and talks of sexual assault

After the riveting success of Luca Guadagnino’s last couple of films such as Challengers, Bones and All and Call Me By Your Name, I was elated to learn of his next feature: an ambiguous college thriller starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri. Despite not knowing much about the film before the day of my showing, I was still looking forward to seeing the trio’s chemistry and what brilliance Guadagnino would come up with this time. The AMC employees should have been scared of my enthusiasm.

While the film has some successes, it’s unfortunately unexceptional to me and didn’t quite hit the same as Guadagnino’s previous films. Most of the dialogue was performative and pretentious, the stakes are low, the ambiguity is all for nothing and the plot is overdone. However, the ending, score and character dynamics are its few saving graces that bring my rating up.

After the Hunt follows Yale philosophy professor Alma (Roberts) and the crossroads she comes to when her good friend and fellow professor, Hank (Garfield), is accused of sexually assaulting Maggie (Edebiri), a PhD student Alma teaches and is also close with. The film opens with Hank walking Maggie home after a colleague-filled dinner party hosted by Alma and her husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg). Maggie is absent from Alma’s class the next day, but is later found outside Alma’s home. She confesses to Alma that Hank sexually assaulted her.

Hank, of course, denies everything, instead bringing up that his purpose for walking Maggie home was to confront her about plagiarizing her dissertation and the allegation against him was made up by Maggie as a result. Maggie and Hank separately ask Alma for support, as Maggie decides whether to press charges and speak with reporters. Hank gets fired and flips out in front of Alma and her students for not standing up for him.

Maggie eventually accuses Hank on the record with a Yale newspaper. She finds that Alma has also accused someone in her life of sexual assault after she steals a newspaper clipping at Alma’s party and translates it, asking Alma if it is the reason she reacted the way she did to the allegation. Alma sees this as a violation of her privacy and later confronts Maggie about her plagiarism — as she has known the whole time Hank’s suspicions were true — also accusing Maggie of mirroring her and says her romantic relationship is performative.

When Alma meets with Hank again, he doubles down on the fact that, while he does flirt with students, he has never slept with or taken advantage of anyone. He and Alma are revealed to have had feelings for each other in the past, and as Hank tries to escalate their relationship, Alma resorts to having to shove him off and kick him out.

Throughout the ordeal, Alma is dealing with stomach pain. Her ulcers perforate, and she reveals to Frederik in the hospital that she was in love with and started a sexual relationship with a much older man — her father’s friend — as a teenager. She publicly accused him of sexual assault out of jealousy once he began dating a woman his age. She details that she ended up rescinding the accusation, but it still led to the friend’s suicide. Frederik tells Alma she was still correct to label his actions as assault despite claiming she did love him, but she disagrees.

In an epilogue, Alma is dean, restoring her career by publishing an article about her assault. She meets Maggie, both declaring they are leading happy lives post-incident. Maggie suspects Alma’s contentment is fabricated and that her article was a selfish move to get to the top, but says it doesn’t matter. They leave, and Guadagnino yells “cut!” off-screen.

That ending is one of the saving graces of this film. While I don’t usually enjoy fourth wall-breaking, I find this decision to work very well, as Guadagnino reminds audiences they just saw a heavily controlled narrative constructed with great care. All the characters are calculating, in conflicts of interest with one another and never present themselves genuinely. 

“This is the headline: ‘Blind to their own asses,’” Roberts told Gerrad Hall at Entertainment Weekly. The ending reflects that and I enjoyed Guadagnino’s choice to include himself directing, because that’s all this film is: characters meticulously directing themselves to stay in favor with their audience.  They are all driven by their own selfishness way more than they realize or care to admit, making the messiness of it all more satisfying and real. Guadagnino’s “cut!” adds to that sentiment.

The score is another big plus, which I’ve come to expect from Guadagnino. Seeing a return collaboration with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross was a delight, as I left my Challengers screening last year buzzing from the music alone. This time was no different, and seeing Ross and Reznor’s names made me nod in approval. It’s ominous, anxiety-inducing and perfectly captures the tone of the film in all aspects. At certain points, there’s nothing but a clock ticking, signaling the things to come, proving the composers’ sound choices remain unmatched.

The characters also make interesting studies.. The back-and-forth behavior and confusing emotions added to the ambiguity of not knowing who is telling the truth. Maggie is hot-and-cold, going from so sure of herself and her words to unstable and inconsistent in her behavior. Hank is the same way, acting like a shallow frat bro one second, then a sophisticated scholar the next, also adding to the vague nature of the truth. Alma is close with Maggie, mentoring and being a real friend. Hank and Alma are best friends despite him being much younger and living a different lifestyle. Alma puts both of them on a pedestal, yet there is always some competition between them (Hank and Alma are both up for tenure at one point, and she and Maggie will always be in competition as they are women in a male-dominated field). At the end of the day, Hank and Maggie look up to Alma, which is why she keeps them close. Frederik even tells Alma as such during their party.

That’s one of the glaring things wrong with After the Hunt, though. Everything is telling and the characters have to say everything to each other instead of letting some things speak for themselves. While I love a thriller focused on dialogue and drama like 12 Angry Men and Doubt, this film ultimately has nothing to say for a subject matter so nuanced. “One could argue that’s the point,” Alissa Wilkinson writes in her review. “[I]f After the Hunt has an ax to grind, it’s about the vapidity of signifier-based politics when dislodged from real life.”

Wilkinson is right — maybe Guadagnino and screenwriter Nora Garrett wanted it to be about having nothing to say and the charade of pretending to. “[I]t’s a gonzo comedy of manners dressed up as a discourse film…you’re supposed to laugh at how everyone in it is auditioning for moral clarity in a world that has none,” Freddie deBoer points out in a Letterboxd review. 

However, in my opinion, if you’re going to delve into this subject matter, position yourself as desperately needing to weigh in on certain social discourse — with two characters presented as victims, nonetheless — and constantly namedrop Freud, Nietzsche and Aristotle’s virtue ethics, you kind of need to have something new and of substance to say about it. You can’t just tell people they should have a certain reaction if it appears in an entirely different way and insists on being so, even if it is “dressing up.” It looks pretentious instead of high-roading, and whether that’s the “point” or not, it didn’t work for me.

The film insists on said high-roading instead of what it pretends to be (and should have been): a gripping case study riddled with investigation, emotion and chaos. Instead, there are no stakes and it doesn’t add anything to the genre. Not only has the “male superior assaults a young female with less power” been done a million times, but there’s nothing original to show for it here. Hank gets fired in the middle of the film, so what’s the point in weighing the evidence presented to us anyway? Maybe Garrett and Guadagnino wanted to stray away from the direction most of these accusatory dramas take, but the way they go about it doesn’t work. I can tell this is Garrett’s first attempt at a screenplay. While the ambiguity of not knowing whether Hank or Maggie are crafting false narratives can be fun at times, it also ends up being pointless. 

Alma’s stomach pains are also a blatantly obvious symbol of her inner turmoil in choosing between her best friend and best student as well as coming to terms with her past. It’s been done before and will be done again, proving the point that this film adds nothing to the genre and doesn’t stand out.

At one point, Alma tells Maggie that she’s “the worst kind of mediocre student,” words I feel also describe this film to a tee. Sometimes a film is just about an event and the people involved, but this should not have been one of them. Despite the character dynamics, score and ending, the lack of message, tired plot and boring execution make it painfully average. We never do find out what exactly happened between Maggie and Hank: is he the typical creep on the hunt for young company, or is Maggie the one hellbent on taking him down before he rightfully outs her? The film leaves audiences guessing beyond the end credits: who will you believe?

Header Image by Alex Carrasquillo