by Tim Gordon
Luca Guadagnino has long been a filmmaker drawn to the spaces where desire, secrets, and power collide. After the Hunt, he turns his attention from the sun-soaked sensuality of Call Me By Your Name to the cloistered, cerebral world of academia. On paper, it’s a setting ripe for his signature mix of emotional complexity and visual flair. In practice, though, this psychological thriller struggles to balance its ambition with its execution, leaving us with a film that raises provocative questions but too often feels cold, distant, and unsatisfying.
The film centers on Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts), a respected Yale professor whose life begins to unravel when her star student and protégé, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), accuses Alma’s close colleague and friend, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assault. The accusation reverberates through the campus, forcing Alma into an impossible position — defend her friend or support her student while also threatening to unearth long-buried secrets from her own past.
The opening dinner party, a Guadagnino hallmark of simmering tension and shifting allegiances, sets the stage brilliantly. But as the film develops, it loses its grip on clarity. Nora Garrett’s script is both dense and ambiguous, layering in academic politics, generational conflict, and personal trauma without giving the audience enough reason to invest in these characters. Maggie’s inner turmoil and intellectual fervor are compellingly played by Edebiri, but her arc often feels like a device rather than a fully fleshed-out journey. Garfield, meanwhile, gives Hank a slippery charm that keeps us guessing, though Guadagnino never commits to showing us whether he’s predator, victim, or something in between.
Roberts delivers the film’s strongest performance. As Alma, she is magnetic, empathetic yet opaque, a woman caught between loyalty, fear, and conscience. There’s a lived-in quality to her performance that keeps the film from collapsing under its own weight. Even so, it’s not enough to overcome the script’s emotional detachment. For all its surface intensity, After the Hunt rarely makes us care.
Visually, Guadagnino is in familiar form. His camera glides through ivy-covered courtyards, book-lined offices, and sterile faculty lounges with a lush, almost painterly eye. The film looks gorgeous, but the beauty becomes a distraction from a story that too often drifts into abstraction. By refusing to provide clarity on the central accusation, was there an assault or not? The film aims to place viewers in the morally gray territory of Alma’s dilemma. Instead, it feels like a cop-out, abdicating responsibility in favor of ambiguity.
There are flashes of brilliance, Alma and Maggie’s mentorship unraveling like a slow-motion car crash, Roberts’ steely façade cracking in moments of vulnerability, and the chilling realization that academia’s power structures are as corrosive as any courtroom. But the film never fully coheres, leaving the audience with fragments of a richer story that might have been.
Ultimately, After the Hunt wants to be a searing exploration of truth, power, and complicity in the #MeToo era. What it delivers is a stylish but emotionally inert thriller, one that dares to ask big questions but falters when it comes to providing meaningful answers.
Grade: C-