After the Hunt
Luca Guadagnino serves up an ethical obstacle course in a challenging, inflammatory drama for our times.
Blurred lines: Andrew Garfield and Julia Roberts
Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.
With the Oscar season already in overdrive, Julia Roberts looks like a near certainty for a best actress nomination. Here, she plays a philosophy professor at Yale who finds that the elite white male environment in which she has managed to thrive is on the verge of imploding. With the greatest intellects in the land encouraged to question the status quo, suddenly such a freedom of expression feels like an endangered animal. It is in this moral minefield that Alma Imhoff (Roberts) finds herself when a favoured student makes an accusation against one of Alma’s closest friends, Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield). The student, Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), is a lesbian of colour while Hank is a privileged white male. Caught in the glare of such precipitous headlights, Alma’s initial reaction to this news is not to the liking of either party. Which one of our friends would we trust more? Whose truth are we to believe? Here, there are complications, as Maggie’s parents have made a considerable financial contribution to the college, while Hank’s hard-won reputation as an outstanding Yale professor is at stake. In the current climate of diversity and inclusivity, Maggie would seem to have the upper hand, but she really must decide between the options of “restorative justice” and pure “vengeance”.
At one point we are told that “the death knell of intellect is politics,” yet this particular moral battlefield could hardly be more political. The writer-director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Challengers), working from a screenplay by the actress Nora Garrett, has endowed his characters with enormous nuance, along with the sort of dialogue that thinkers breastfed on Freud and Engels could only be privy to. What is more interesting is the human frailty suffered by these figures in an academic landscape, navigating the pot holes of a suddenly frightening political correctness. And in this brave new world, there is little room for human error…
It is the battle of cerebral rigour versus emotional vulnerability that makes After the Hunt so compelling and challenging, with Guadagnino deftly weeding out the details of his characters’ back lives with meticulous skill. Alma is suffering from a debilitating health condition, yet fuels her days with cigarettes, candy and Coke. Her attentive, dutiful husband Frederik, beautifully essayed by Michael Stuhlbarg, conceals his feelings of inadequacy with a veneer of pomposity, although he’s not above spasms of passive aggression. In any other film, the words that these people spout would be dismissed as pretentious, but the intellectual one-upmanship of what seems to be a dying breed is all the more piquant as the warheads of political correctness are fired across their bows. Be careful what you think, but even more importantly, be careful what you say. In this world, being smart is fast becoming a liability.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny, Thaddea Graham, David Leiber, Lío Mehiel, Will Price, Nora Garrett.
Dir Luca Guadagnino, Pro Brian Grazer, Allan Mandelbaum and Luca Guadagnino, Ex Pro Nora Garrett, Screenplay Nora Garrett, Ph Malik Hassan Sayeed, Pro Des Stefano Baisi, Ed Marco Costa, Music Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Costumes Giulia Piersanti, Sound Paul Carter, Dialect coach Liz Himelstein.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Imagine Entertainment/Frenesy Film Company/Big Indie Pictures-Sony Pictures.
138 mins. USA/Italy. 2025. US Rel: 10 October 2025. UK Rel: 17 October 2025. Cert. 15.
