At this point in the #MeToo era, you know the basic chronology of how accusations of sexual misconduct unfold. So do After the Hunt director Luca Guadagnino and writer Nora Garrett as they unspool a yarn of a student leveling a charge of assault against her professor. And so, too, do the characters in the film themselves.
As academics – philosophers, to boot – the ensemble of After the Hunt possesses such an awareness of the stakes and narratives that they can abstract the situation to see themselves as players in a grand game. Julia Roberts’ Alma Imhoff, a Yale professor on the verge of securing tenure, is the wiliest grandmaster of maneuvering. She must act shrewdly out of self-protection when her protégé, Ayo Edebiri’s Maggie Resnick, comes forward to report the inappropriate treatment by her instructor, Andrew Garfield’s Hank.
In the moment she realizes the gravity of Maggie’s experience during her student’s confession, cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed captures a glimpse of Alma between the bars of a staircase. This quick but telling glance explains and contextualizes how she’ll act for the rest of After the Hunt: like a caged animal. One revelation could beget another, toppling Alma’s delicate house of cards across both personal and professional relationships.
The film moves somewhat languidly as it goes through the necessary motions of the preliminary stages of dealing with the allegations. Dialogue between the characters carries an aura of predetermination, as all participants understand the roles they will play in the upcoming hubbub. Add to that a feeling of suffocating claustrophobia from the sparse set design and the chilly color palette, a notable reversal from the usually lush stylings of Guadagnino, and After the Hunt can feel a bit like a gussied-up potboiler.
“Can we stop being smart for a second?” Maggie explodes in frustration during one exchange. It’s a plea that feels directed at her conversation partner but could just as easily be leveled at the film overall. The characters are supposed to be sharp, but they might be a little too clever to build the kind of suspense and psychological drama the film needs to establish the scenario. Their intelligence is not just a Trojan horse to allow for the script’s didactic ideas about gender, sex, and power. It just drains too many early scenes for vitality.
But the sands slowly shift in Garrett’s script once it clears the necessary and familiar table stakes, and what emerges is something far more sophisticated and intriguing than initially meets the eye. As its title suggests, After the Hunt finds its richest material from navigating the fallout of the consequences rather than the act itself. It moves beyond the simple binaries of innocence/guilt or victim/perpetrator to probe the thornier questions raised by cancel culture.
A fascinating new landscape emerges as the dust settles, revealing the deeper roots of the trio’s desperation. For Alma, it’s the ageism of academia that she feels has denied her work true recognition. In Maggie’s case, it’s the cross-pressure of being a Black woman in a white-dominated space while also coasting on the benefits of her wealthy upbringing. Even in the case of Hank, who’s the farthest thing from a one-dimensional monster, he carries a real chip on his shoulder as someone who had to scrap his way from humble origins into an elite field.
Luckily for them (and for the audience), the film also leans into the perspective of two supporting characters who straddle being outside and inside the plot’s dilemma. Some of the best scenes in After the Hunt come from Alma’s long-suffering husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), and the departmental shrink, Kim (Chloë Sevigny). Be they sounding boards for the drama or participants in it, they’re crucial components in adding dimension to the story and opening up its cloistered chamber drama.
All these competing agendas result in some vicious verbal jousting throughout After the Hunt as the characters wield their wiles as weapons against each other. It’s more subdued than the shouting match one might expect with tempers running so high, particularly from the expertly coiled performance of Julia Roberts. She thrives on receiving real direction around her emotional modulation, not just going for broke at the top of her register in each scene.
Like all the characters in After the Hunt, Alma is cunning enough to know the vulnerabilities of others yet not always perceptive enough to recognize her own. For academics living inside their own logic-driven brains, they’ve blinded themselves to the impulsiveness and irrationality of their bodies. Guadagnino thrives on capturing quick, quiet moments of revelation where they realize how the head and the heart don’t always move in conjunction.
That dissonance is echoed in the film’s music, an uncharacteristically minimalistic work from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that frequently isolates orchestral sections. During key moments of After the Hunt, they lean into half-steps to punctuate a tense scene. It’s a sonic showcase of how, on the piano as in life, sometimes the adjacent keys strike the most discordant tune when played side-by-side.
From the opening credits, which use the Windsor font famously deployed in all Woody Allen films, After the Hunt is comfortable sitting within two competing truths. The font signals the type of upper-crust moral parable that will unfold. But it also cheekily nods to Allen’s famously re-adjudicated case of sexual abuse as well as the often-outdated cultural attitudes atop which his films sit. Guadagnino may frustrate some by refusing to throw out a sensibility widely derided by some younger viewers. But the provocation of foregrounding the discomfort of having to sit with older generational outlooks that will not disappear any time soon feels entirely appropriate given the tenor of the film’s discourse.
Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, The Playlist and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.