When promising philosophy student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses her charming yet sleazy professor Hank (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault, Yale University becomes caught in a whirlwind of legal charges, administrative gossip, and online discourse. It's up to Maggie's mentor and Hank's longtime colleague Alma (Julia Roberts) to arrive at truths while saving her own skin in Luca Guadagnino's latest.
Earnest #MeToo-era thriller with a riveting ensemble. Be it his queer dramas like Call Me by Your Name and, well, Queer, or his boundary-pushing dramas like the blood-soaked Bones and All and the sweat-soaked Challengers, Luca Guadagnino is driven by an erotic fascination with the human body. Given the timely and concerning premise of After the Hunt, this one is a different kind of Guadagnino joint, with the filmmaker thankfully not relying on any cheap visual gags to play out the assault. Instead, this might be his most verbose film yet, with characters going back and forth over uncomfortable truths and the probable lies they stem from. Nothing is what it seems, more so with a chameleon-like ensemble fronted by a career-best Julia Roberts. If you thought she shed her Pretty Woman glitz in Erin Brockovich, here she turns into a steel-hearted academic forced to choose between human empathy and a shark-like survival instinct. And she does it all brilliantly, capturing Alma's tight-lipped exterior, pukish eating disorders, and a helpless desire not always to be the one in charge. Roberts is supported by Edebiri, who plays Maggie by walking on eggshells, arousing empathy for her psychological ordeals but also evokes suspicion with a coy eyes-on-the-ground uncertainty. And then, there's Andrew Garfield, who sheds his Golden Retriever-coded good boy energy with a typecast-breaking turn as an academic sleazebag. Even before accusations are hurled at him, Garfield's privacy-invading stares and manspreading closeness easily raise eyebrows. The former Spider-Man doesn't even overdo the sleaze like a #MeToo caricature; he convincingly becomes one with it.
Despite its cast, After the Hunt sadly falters with a priority of shock over sensitivity, and some surface-level discourse. The chief problem with After the Hunt is its tendency to act smarter than it sounds. It's commendable that debutant screenwriter Nora Garett takes on a plethora of themes from internalized woman-on-woman misogyny (Julia Roberts' sly, coy and even judgmental inquisitions towards her distressed protégé) to frustrations over the Gen-Z's obsession in "cancelling" more than discussing (classroom outbursts and dinner-table conversations in academic parties grilling Nietzsche as a probable Nazi and diagnosing Freud as a misogynist). Sadly, the enticing back-and-forth dialogues grow tiresome over the film's bloated 2hrs+ runtime, with these heated conversations not really going anywhere, serving only the purpose of drawing awkward chuckles in the cinema and creating a rift between the new-gen kids and the "boomers". Granted, both ends of the spectrum can have their absurdly self-serious takes on cancel culture and the like. But when After the Hunt doesn't really go the full mile in adding more substance and exploring the repercussions of these words, all that remains are just words. Maybe that's supposed to be a meta-commentary on us as a chronically online and passionately polarised society, with so much to say but only within a bubble.
A mixed bag that's still engaging, courtesy of Guadagnino's taut direction. The only issue is that this clash of ideals takes up so much of the film that the seriousness of Maggie's claims and the normalisation of sexual abuse in academic spaces gets muted in the titular hunt and its aftermath. All is not lost, in the hands of a maestro like Guadagnino; some edge-of-the-seat thrills remain to be felt. Anxious whip pans, awkward zoom-ins on the character's hands, and some shrieky bass and horn notes from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's toe-curling score. An engaging and breathless ride, expected from the man who could grant a first-person POV to a tennis ball and who could convince Daniel Craig to dive into a Lynchian ayahuasca trip. Assisted with the slight moral greyness of Garrett's screenplay, Guadagnino crafts a decent story of lies and deceit. This mystery begs us to question the apparent accused and the accuser, while also our own preconceived biases and doubts. A film like this is required to challenge our own mindsets at a time of "public circus" trials, like Amber Heard vs Johnny Depp. The assault and the accusations are reduced to punchlines and plot twists when After the Hunt mostly sticks to a Black Swan-like series of self-introspective breakdowns for Julia Roberts's protagonist. After the Hunt isn't a bad film; it just brims with undercooked potential.
Well-acted #MeToo-era drama is relevant and thrilling but unnecessarily provocative.
