After the Hunt

The Anatomy of a Grudge

The first sound in *After the Hunt* is that clock, ticking away before the room even comes into focus. It feels blunt, almost rude, which is exactly right for a film where time and truth sit there like hard facts while the Yale philosophy crowd tries to finesse both. I walked in expecting the humid sensuality Guadagnino has been leaning into lately—the sweaty triangulation of *Challengers*, the bodily ache of *Queer*. Instead, he gives us a campus sealed in cold air, full of wool jackets and bad academic wine. It’s a real tonal swerve. Whether that feels purposeful or just dry probably depends on how much tolerance you have for people using elegant language to cover shabby instincts.



The setup is volatile enough on its own. Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), rich and brilliant, accuses the popular professor Hank (Andrew Garfield) of crossing a sexual line after a night of hard drinking. Alma (Julia Roberts), a tenure-track philosopher who mentors Maggie and has a deeply tangled history with Hank, gets pulled into the blast radius. Nora Garrett’s script is clearly trying to cut into the post-#MeToo moment, generational resentment, and the rot that institutions protect. Sometimes it cuts deep. Sometimes it just flails. I keep coming back to Guadagnino scoring these icy confrontations with warm Antônio Carlos Jobim melodies. The contrast is strange, almost perverse. Maybe that’s the point—a reminder that these academics keep trying to theorize their way out of basic human mess.

Or maybe he just really likes Jobim. I’m honestly not sure.



What I don’t have to guess about is Julia Roberts. If you’re hoping that famous smile will show up and relieve the pressure, forget it. Her Alma is held so tight she seems to be punishing herself with posture alone. In the big confrontation with Maggie, Guadagnino keeps zeroing in on hands, as if fingers tell the truth faster than faces do. While Maggie talks about going public, Alma’s short dark nails press into her palms. Then Roberts drops the line—"Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable." Guadagnino makes a pointed, thorny choice right there: Maggie blurs in the foreground, while Alma’s face gets all the focus. It’s revealing, and a little maddening, because it exposes the film’s own bias.

At heart, this isn’t a movie about the allegation itself. It’s about the drained-out woman expected to sit in judgment over it.



That tilt in perspective is also where the movie starts wobbling for me. Garfield makes Hank slippery in exactly the right way, using all that lanky charm to crowd people without seeming to. Edebiri keeps Maggie tense and unreadable, someone who knows vulnerability can also be leverage. But Garrett’s script too often treats them like positions in an argument instead of actual people. Ryan Lattanzio at IndieWire got at the problem when he wrote that the film "strives for moral ambiguity, but ends up startlingly morally stark," with ideas that feel "ripped from an earlier time." That rings true. By the time Michael Stuhlbarg shows up as Alma’s husband and wafts through a dinner party like a wounded ghost, the whole thing starts sagging under the weight of its own seriousness.

Still, I can’t write *After the Hunt* off. There’s real sadness in it. Beneath the clunky cancel-culture material and the obvious symbolism, the movie catches the loneliness of people who have built entire lives around being the smartest person in the room. When it ends—with credits that cheekily echo a Woody Allen font, of all things—you don’t leave with a neat villain or a clean survivor. You leave with a cluster of brilliant people who never figured out how to hear anyone but themselves.