After the Hunt

The Architecture of Denial

It is perhaps the most dangerous thing a film can do in our current moment: to ask us to empathize with the silence of the bystander. Luca Guadagnino’s *After the Hunt* is a film that initially masquerades as a procedural thriller about a university scandal, only to reveal itself as a much colder, more jagged study of how we build fortresses around our own traumas. This is not the sun-drenched, peach-eating languor of *Call Me by Your Name*, nor the kinetic sweat of *Challengers*. Instead, Guadagnino has traded summer heat for the sterile, fluorescent chill of a Yale winter, where the architecture is imposing and the morality is as brittle as old parchment.

From the opening frames, the film’s visual language establishes a sense of suffocation. Cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, returning to feature film after a decades-long hiatus, shoots the university spaces not as halls of enlightenment, but as cages of prestige. The lighting is often murky, relying on practical lamps that leave the corners of the frame in shadow—a perfect visual metaphor for Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), a philosophy professor who has constructed her entire life around what she chooses not to see.



The narrative hook is deceptively familiar. When Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a star student with a fierce, almost predatory admiration for Alma, accuses Alma’s colleague and close friend Hank (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault, the film seems poised to enter the well-trodden territory of "cancel culture" discourse. But Guadagnino and screenwriter Nora Garrett are uninterested in the trial itself. The film’s true subject is Alma’s internal paralysis. As she navigates the accusation, Roberts delivers a performance of terrifying restraint. She is a woman holding her breath, her face a mask of tenure-track civility that barely conceals a decades-old ulcer eating her alive.

Guadagnino’s direction shines in the dialogue-heavy scenes, which play out like verbal fencing matches where no one actually says what they mean. The camera lingers uncomfortably close to faces, capturing the micro-expressions of people who are lying to themselves. The sound design, featuring a nerve-shredding score by Reznor and Ross, often swells to drown out the polite conversation, signaling the chaos beneath the tweed.



The heart of the film lies in the tragic, twisted mentorship between Alma and Maggie. Edebiri is electric here, shedding her usual comedic warmth for something sharper and more desperate. Maggie is not just a victim seeking justice; she is a mirror Alma refuses to look into. When the film finally exhumes Alma’s own secret history—a complex, controversial backstory involving her own past "accusation"—it challenges the audience to reconcile the victim with the perpetrator. The film suggests that power isn't just about who holds the gavel, but who controls the narrative of their own memory.

Ultimately, *After the Hunt* is a film about the cost of survival. It argues that the institutions we cling to for safety—marriage, tenure, reputation—are often the very things that prevent us from healing. The final act, which jumps forward in time, offers no easy catharsis. There is no grand speech, no public redemption. There is only the quiet, devastating realization that some hunts never end; the prey just learns to hide better. In a year of loud cinematic statements, Guadagnino has made a film that screams in a whisper.