"After the Hunt"

 ☆☆

I could lie. Lying would be thematically appropriate when talking about Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt, which is a movie about truth, lies, beliefs, philosophies, all that heady stuff. So, I could easily lie and tell you that the movie had me riveted. But here's the truth, and it's one I don't like to say: I dozed off watching After the Hunt.

On paper, After the Hunt should be fascinating and compelling, but something goes terribly wrong, and the movie is only interesting in fits and starts and sometimes it moves so slowly, so coyly, that ... well, I can't make excuses. Yes, I nodded off, and I'm embarrassed about it, so take that into consideration.

Is it fair to write a review about a movie that I watched in such a state? What's fair, anyway? Maybe I'm entitled to do so simply by virtue of having been in the theater while it screened. It's the kind of argument that one of the film's characters might make.

They're all academics — not just any sort of academics, either, but professors and students at Yale University, where Julia Roberts is Alma Imhoff, a philosophy professor who lectures about Foucault's Panopticon and is on the tenure track. So is Andrew Garfield's Hank, who she used to mentor. Alma has a long and passionless and shockingly unbelievable marriage to Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg, playing it soft and emasculated), and they have an even more shockingly unbelievable house where they hold a party at the beginning of the movie.

During the party, a PhD student of Alma's named Maggie (Ayo Edibiri) engages in the kind of witty banter in the warmly lit living room that might feel like it was lifted straight out of a Woody Allen film shot by Carlo DiPalma or Sven Nykvist. To a large degree, After the Hunt seems to revere Allen, down to the opening titles — white Windsor Light lettering against a black screen.

But ... Woody Allen? The once-hallowed director brought down by allegations of sexual misconduct? What is Guadagnino saying here? Within moments, it's clear: After the Hunt exists less as a melodrama than as a political statement against the sins of political correctness, cancel culture, and ultra-liberal moral relativism.

After that opening party, Hank takes Maggie home. The next day, she alleges that Hank may have done ... something. She tells Alma, who is not just good friends with Hank, but also has had an affair with him. All of which sounds intriguing, except After the Hunt takes a ... very ... very ... long ... time ... to establish all the contours of its plot, and when it finally does, all of it feels half-thought.

It's as if Nora Garrett, the screenwriter, is aware of all the hot-button topics the movie covers, but just barely. The movie doesnt' dive too deeply into any of them. After the Hunt takes about a dozen big issues, ranging from trans rights to cancel culture to academic politics, and gives all of them lip service but can't figure out how to narrow in on the most salient ones. It's a weirdly unfocused movie, which combined with its glacial pace makes it a challenge to sit through.

Is it about the aftermath of sexual assault? Is it about personal responsibility to speak out against injustice? Is it about entitlement? Gender disparities? The decline of patriarchal authority? Sexual identity? Academic integrity? Maybe it's about all of those things, but scattered among them is a specific story about Alma, her problematic past and her (yes, really) pill addiction. 

It's no wonder, then, that as good as the actors are — and there are moments when Roberts comes close to equalling some of her best work — they often seem lost. When Chloë Sevigny comes on screen in an unflattering wig and glasses, she seems genuinely confused about what she's supposed to be doing. If the other actors appear relatively more confident, they're also perplexed about the film's viewpoint and motivations. The performances may be technically sound, but they're uniformly unconvincing.

So's the film — so much so, I lost the struggle it posed. The final third is nominally better than the rest of it, until a final epilogue scene that feels so irrelevant and unbelievable that it undermines the already shaky ground the rest of the movie occupies and presents such a morally and ethically unlikely scenario that it seemed to undermine many of the film's primary arguments.

Frustrated, often confused by motivations, I finally had to give up. You may have a different response. But if you do go see After the Hunt, go ahead and bring along a pillow. Just in case.

Viewed October 28, 2025 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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