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“It’s a fucking minefield, Alma,” the Dean of Humanities at Yale warns Julia Roberts’ Dr. Imhoff. Barely a few days have passed since her colleague, Hank (Andrew Garfield), has “crossed the line” with one of her students, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), and Alma, a philosophy professor on the verge of tenure, is trying to navigate the aftermath of a sexual assault that’s forcing her to reconsider her allegiances. (Maggie is her favorite pupil; Hank is her best friend and, no trivial detail, onetime lover.) Several characters in Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt will give their two cents on our post-MeToo era—a “shallow cultural climate” (Hank’s words) ruled by “the abusive patriarchal agenda” (Maggie’s). But of all the attempts to sum up our zeitgeist, the Dean’s is the one that comes closest to encapsulating this film’s clumsy handling of the horrific act at its center. After the Hunt aims to tackle our so-called cancel culture, but wrestling with that weighty topic isn’t the same as meaningfully reckoning with it; if there’s anything genuinely uncomfortable about Guadagnino’s film, it’s not button-pushing issues but the reactionary way it squanders them.
This is the first feature written by actress Nora Garrett, who, in a Vanity Fair interview a few days back, said she didn’t base her script on a specific case––never mind the apocryphal title card suggesting “it happened at Yale.” Says Garrett: “We were missing a sense of gray area, but also, we were missing a sense of how power obfuscates, how those within power are insulated from consequences, and those without it are often naked to consequences.” This is all well and good, but the quote kept ringing in my head through the film because of a certain question it begs: just where’s the gray?
Propelled as it is by the violence Maggie suffered from one of her teachers, After the Hunt belongs wholly to Alma. You can sense that in the visual hierarchies established by Malik Hassan Sayeed’s shallow-focus cinematography, by his camera’s tendency to single out her face to the detriment of everyone else, including Maggie—in a pivotal exchange between them, as the young woman says she’ll press charges against Hank, it is Roberts’ anguished visage Sayeed lingers on, blurring Maggie’s in the foreground. But it’s in the script that the prioritization of Alma’s perspective feels most disconcerting. By tethering the film to her journey, Garrett reduces people around her to ciphers stuck in their respective echo chambers.
Alma lives with her husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) in a lush flat where she hosts long, alcohol-fueled symposiums open to faculty members and students alike––in the prologue, we watch her flirt with Hank while basking in Maggie’s adulation. That Frederik should feel emasculated by all the energy his wife pours into wooing her cloistered circle of fans might explain why he’d be so prone to belittling Maggie when she, later in the film, finally opens up about her thesis over dinner (possibly the only time in After the Hunt where Edebiri’s character is defined by something other than her trauma). But the man’s behavior toward the young woman is one of Guadagnino’s most unimaginative moments. No, he’s not an “asshole,” as Alma calls him while he blasts classical music at full volume to disrupt her tête-à-tête with Maggie, but something more desolate still: a caricature.
He’s not alone. It takes Chloë Sevigny over an hour to utter her first line, and when she does, her character––Kim, a therapist at Yale and one of Dr Imhoff’s closest friends––is having a drink with Alma at a bar infested by students. She rants about how public toilets have gotten filthier since they’ve turned genderless, before redirecting her drunken screed to our “insane times” and Maggie’s predicament: “What happened to stuffing everything down and developing a crippling dependency in your thirties like the rest of us?” Alma leaves, but Kim stays, stunned by the fact that the bar should play––of all songs––one by the Smiths, which she adores, presumably as much as she likes Dirty Harry: a poster with Clint Eastwood holding a gun is the only thing adorning her otherwise nondescript office.
It’s not Kim coming across as a nostalgist that’s the problem here, nor are her tirades against these privileged kids she feels so severed from. It’s that these details and jokes have the same effect of Frederik’s tantrums: they wind up lampooning these characters and their stances while cheapening Maggie’s own trauma. This isn’t a bug, but a manifestation of the film’s M.O. To drive home its points, After the Hunt must pigeonhole Alma and her peers as members of a generation eons removed from Maggie’s, thus reducing the two to warring camps. That’s a legitimate suggestion, and one wasted by the film’s tendency to turn everyone––boomers, millennials, and Gen Z-ers––into spokespersons spitting slogans cribbed from some vitriolic subreddits.
Even Alma, in the end, succumbs to the same fate: her downward spiral into spiteful pariah registers less as riveting than cringeworthy. Roberts embodies that transformation emphatically, but Guadagnino’s characterization of Dr. Imhoff is disjointed; After the Hunt proceeds as a series of talking points, the people uttering them as lifeless as some of Sayeed’s shadowy frames. In a heated altercation, the professor admonishes her former star: “Not everything is meant to make you feel comfortable, Maggie.” It’s another bold and intriguing claim, were it not for the fact that it comes seconds after a particularly crude, depressingly banal slur that Alma throws at Maggie’s trans partner. A braver, smarter film would have had the courage of addressing some thorniest points without inviting us to wag a finger at those who hold them. After the Hunt, in turn, stares at that fucking minefield, unable or unwilling to take a step forward.
After the Hunt premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival and will open on October 10.
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