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In After the Hunt, Luca Guadagnino invites us into the mahogany sanctum of Yale’s philosophy department and quietly locks the door. What follows is a claustrophobic inquest into truth, guilt, and intellectual vanity—a drama that aims to dissect “cancel culture” but winds up probing something even more disquieting: our collective addiction to moral performance.
It begins with a provocation. Before the first image, before a single face appears, there is noise—a violently overamplified burst of jazz, swelling to near-comic aggression. The music, as we soon learn, is being wielded by Frederick Olsson (Michael Stuhlbarg), a psychoanalyst who uses sound as a blunt emotional instrument, tormenting his wife Alma (Julia Roberts) by turning the stereo up to eleven whenever his pride is bruised. The moment feels ridiculous, almost alienating. Yet it establishes Guadagnino’s strategy: weaponized style. The audience, like Alma, must endure this sonic assault before we can begin to think.
And thinking—that hallowed, overburdened verb—is what the film pretends to be about. Nora Garrett’s debut screenplay, equal parts intellectual thriller and domestic psychodrama, is set within the wood-paneled labyrinth of Yale University, where prestige has ossified into performance art. Alma Imhoff, Roberts’s formidable philosopher on the brink of tenure, is introduced as a creature of ritual precision: coffee at dawn, lecture notes alphabetized, conscience in check. Her husband hovers in the background like an anxious shadow, muttering about marital neglect. Alma’s intellectual circle—a coquettish colleague, Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), and a precocious doctoral student, Maggie Price (Ayo Edebiri)—orbit her brilliance with varying degrees of devotion and envy.
Guadagnino stages their world with a near-satirical sensuality. The homes and classrooms gleam like museum exhibits of liberal refinement; the camera caresses leather-bound books and oak furniture as though these were the relics of a dying civilization. It’s a landscape of comfort—warm lighting, soft jazz, and high ideals—poised to erupt into scandal.
That eruption comes after one of Guadagnino’s signature parties, where wit flows as freely as wine. The guests, half-drunk on their own eloquence, trade references to Nietzsche and Foucault as if intellectual citation were a contact sport. But beneath the chatter lies an unease that Roberts channels exquisitely: the suspicion that she’s become a relic of her own generation’s feminism, out of step with the moral codes of her students. Later that night, Maggie arrives at Alma’s doorstep, trembling, with an accusation—that Hank, the golden boy of the department, assaulted her.
This is the film’s detonator, and it goes off with unnerving restraint. There is no flashback, no verification, only competing narratives that shift underfoot like sand. The script nods to Doubt (2008) and Oleanna (1992), but it lacks their moral economy; Guadagnino prefers atmosphere to argument. His true subject isn’t justice but interpretation—the ways people weaponize meaning to preserve their self-image. Alma must decide where her loyalties lie: with her traumatized student, whose story feels both sincere and rehearsed, or with her friend and rival, whose denial is equally plausible.
Julia Roberts, returning to serious dramatic territory after years of genial competence, gives her most disciplined performance in decades. Alma is a woman armored in intellect, yet perpetually on the verge of collapse. Roberts plays her like an actress who knows the difference between power and control; her stillness hums with calculation. When she finally explodes—in a lecture hall tirade about the moral infantilization of students—it’s not catharsis but confession. She’s railing as much against her own obsolescence as against the culture she helped create.
Ayo Edebiri’s Maggie, by contrast, is all nervous modernity—a Gen-Z oracle who mistakes moral certitude for integrity. Guadagnino and Garrett sketch her not as a villain or victim but as an emblem of contemporary confusion: a young woman fluent in the rhetoric of justice yet unsteady in its practice. Edebiri’s performance is remarkable for its ambivalence; every line trembles between sincerity and strategy. The film’s one misstep is how little it mines Maggie’s identity beyond the superficial triad—Black, queer, rich—that the script keeps invoking without exploration.
Andrew Garfield, as Hank, plays the accused with oily charm and existential terror. His face, always boyishly earnest, becomes a mask of grievance. In a lesser film, he’d be the monster or martyr; here, he’s something messier—a man undone not only by accusation but by his own narcissistic need to be adored.
If the performances are sharp, the structure is anything but. Guadagnino’s pacing, usually his strength, meanders. The film’s middle hour circles itself like an argument unwilling to land, repeating motifs—ticking clocks, whispered apologies, migraine-inducing montages of campus corridors—that substitute tension for development. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score, a relentless percussive pulse, seems to be counting down to an explosion that never comes.
Yet that anticlimax feels almost intentional. After the Hunt isn’t about resolution; it’s about paralysis—the inability to act when every action can be misread. Guadagnino has built a Rorschach drama, a film that invites projection rather than persuasion. Viewers looking for a verdict will leave exasperated; those willing to dwell in uncertainty may find a grim pleasure in its opacity.
There are echoes here of Tár, another recent masterpiece of female power and downfall. But where Todd Field’s film dissected genius under siege, Guadagnino’s is more concerned with perception—the optics of morality in an age when ethics itself feels performative. At one point, a weary dean (a delicious cameo by Chloë Sevigny) sighs, “I used to be in the business of ideas. Now I’m in the business of optics.” It’s a line that doubles as the film’s thesis—and perhaps its confession.
The visual design reinforces that point. Every frame of After the Hunt is composed like a philosophical painting: light refracted through glass, intellect reflected in mirrors, truth distorted by framing. Guadagnino, ever the sensualist, turns Yale’s gothic architecture into a metaphor for moral rot—beauty so refined it curdles into decay.
Still, one senses the film straining under its own ambition. Garrett’s dialogue often teeters on parody; the philosophical name-dropping (“the ethics of Nietzschean will,” “Foucault’s panopticon of power”) becomes a form of set dressing, meant less to illuminate than to seduce. And yet, that seduction feels deliberate. After the Hunt is not a moral treatise; it’s a mirror held up to the people who write them.
The epilogue, set in 2025, lands with quiet devastation. Alma, stripped of tenure and reputation, retreats into anonymity. Maggie, now a media darling, delivers a TED Talk on truth and trauma, her rhetoric honed to perfection. The camera lingers on Alma watching the clip on her laptop—expression unreadable, perhaps even proud. It’s Guadagnino’s slyest moment: the recognition that every downfall becomes content, every hunt renewed in the endless theater of judgment.
In the end, After the Hunt is both maddening and magnetic—a film that fails as argument but triumphs as mirror. Its contradictions are its meaning. Guadagnino gives us a world where every moral position is a form of self-fashioning, every confession another bid for control. The music blares, the intellect dazzles, the truth remains inaudible.
And perhaps that’s the point. In an era that demands certainty, Guadagnino dares to make a film about doubt—not as a failure of conviction, but as the last honest form of thinking left.
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