The worst class of people in the world inhabit After the Hunt. Director Luca Guadagnino introduces them as party guests of Yale philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) and her psychiatrist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), tossing off references to Kierkegaard and Foucault. Beneath the highbrow cocktail chatter, the hosts and guests score points against one another, competing for sexual attention and academic tenure.
Guadagnino and screenwriter Nora Garrett observe the ruling class that controls contemporary moral warfare, the high and mighty who scavenge other people’s personal feelings as trophies. Alma is preyed upon by her guest Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a black lesbian Yalie who pilfers a private memento from Alma’s home and then blackmails Alma’s flirty colleague Henrik, a.k.a. Hank (a preposterously brainy-studly Andrew Garfield), leading to an incendiary Me Too controversy.
After the Hunt should be satire. The white-on-black introductory credits demand comparison to Woody Allen at his most laughably solemn, the sanctimonious atmosphere invites derision, while the intramural sexual animosity parodies Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Still, almost immediately, the film resists poking fun at bourgeois pretensions. It enters the overrefined territory of Todd Field’s Tár.
It’s hard to know how to take this combination of poison-pen intrigue, private panic, and popular issues. One’s puzzlement is compounded by similarities to the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas catastrophe, memories of David Mamet’s Oleanna, and recent campus turmoil. It’s all implicit in Garrett’s conceit; she draws us deeper into current anxieties, yet nothing gets clarified.
Through Alma (who, suffering from a tormented past and physical ailments, self-medicates with liquor and drugs), the film encourages us to sympathize with a soul troubled by her own hyper intelligence. After this supposition — that the smartest people in the world are in conflict with their human frailties — the filmmakers refuse to hold the nation’s elite accountable for making the world miserable.
When the larcenous, pampered, nose-ringed Maggie plays the race card, then the non-binary card (replete with her post-op trans lover, Lío Mehiel), Garrett’s story gets entangled in its own topicality. In the film’s best scene, Alma is cornered by a gang of students defending Maggie, screaming “We want accountability!” The campus termagants are obese, disabled, or trans — easily caricatured like the Zoomer swarm in One Battle After Another. Later, Alma gets off a sharp riposte, “Don’t you have some obscure protest to be publicly angry at?” Not a good line, but you know her feeling.
Guadagnino’s empathy for upper-class agony (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, Call Me by Your Name, Queer) feels intimate, but he doesn’t go all the way. He employs some elegant narrative trickery: blurred focus, overheard off-screen direction (“Cut!”), and an ironizing atonal music score. Yet, instead of closer analysis, Garrett’s slick script shies away from the exposé she sets up. Accused of being aloof and impenetrable by her porn-addicted husband, Alma confesses her own failings and hypocrisy, and regrets that her “rottenness was seen” before she could “expunge it.” Such wordplay inflates and trivializes everything the film was meant to reveal. Alma’s class-conscious self-pity (including infidelity and a mawkish hidden backstory) seems contrived. It all comes down to the very egotistical class defensiveness the film ought to explicate.
Alma and Maggie anticipate mutual fealty and then misconstrue it. Roberts’s aged, drawn look contrasts with Edebiri’s callow insensitivity, but both modern types are predatory and repellant (as if Garrett poised Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler against Ibsen’s Nora). They struggle with understanding and forgiving each other, but shared victimhood (“Higher education is run by white men”) ultimately distances them — from each other, from others, and from us.
After the Hunt was in production recently enough to include news broadcasts of the Los Angeles Palisades inferno. But instead of providing urgency, this detail muddles the filmmaker’s attempt to view contemporary crises through a moral lens. (The movie makes no reference to recent pro-Hamas campus riots.) These issues made a surprising selection for the opening night of this year’s New York Film Festival, but the film is as flattering as it is provocative. Todd Solondz’s groundbreaking Storytelling comes to mind in an early classroom scene when Guadagnino and Garrett initiate a philosophical question: “What determines the moral worth of a nation?” But the Ivy League narcissism in After the Hunt provides no answer.