After the Hunt: Luca Guadagnino’s overworked campus drama is designed to provoke but ends up feeling dated

• Reviewed from the 2025 Venice Film Festival

After which hunt, exactly, and how long after? The issues with Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt may not begin with the title, but they certainly end there, given that the only definitive post-hunt section of this glib optics-vs-ethics-in-academia drama is its rushed 5-years-later epilogue. In it, everyone’s situations have changed so completely since one quick cut ago that we have to wonder what happened, in that invisible half-decade, to the film’s bewilderingly inconsistent female leads: tenure-track philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) and her adoring PhD candidate/acolyte Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). Was there perhaps a whole other hunt that we don’t know about? 

But spin back to the beginning, to before the hunt of After the Hunt, and everything, from the ear-splitting ticking clock motif that accompanies the montage of Alma and husband Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg) in their morning routine, to the troll-worthy use of the Woody Allen typeface for the opening credits, promises something transgressive or at least provocative, or at the very least, consequential. “Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable” chides the movie’s tagline, and Guadagnino’s typically clever craftsmanship sure does try to up the discomfort ante. Footage of sleeping baby pandas would put you on edge if it was slathered in this clangingly discordant score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross — two names it’s especially funny to see rendered in white-on-black Windsor Light. But the narrative never discomfits at all – even the longwinded initial party scene, set in Alma’s posh apartment with the principals draped over the luxe furnishings like reclining Romans, feels oddly cosy, like the opening to a murder mystery. (Spoiler: the culprit turns out to be wokeism, in the living room, with a hardback copy of Foucault for Beginners.) 

Coolly elegant Alma is a star in the Yale philosophy firmament, as is her close friend and possible lover Hank (Andrew Garfield). They both are up for the same coveted long-term position, but Alma’s buddy, faculty member Kim (Chloe Sevigny, underused despite delivering the film’s best scene) and philosophy postgrad Maggie, who is maybe brilliant but maybe just the daughter of rich patrons, think she ought to edge it. At Alma’s party Maggie sneaks off to the bathroom following a barbed exchange with Hank (although one of the weaknesses in Nora Garrett’s screenplay is that everyone speaks in the cadence of zinger, when what they’re saying is largely devoid of zing) and discovers, while rooting around for spare toilet paper, a stashed envelope containing clues to a big secret in Alma’s past. Like too much in this busily overworked plot, it will end up having almost no bearing on anything.  

The following evening Maggie turns up bedraggled on Alma’s doorstep, describing how Hank sexually assaulted her. Alma recoils, which angers and disappoints Maggie. But whether she believes Maggie or Hank, in whose version of events the false accusation is designed to deflect from his discovery of Maggie’s plagiarism, Alma realises that her own professional standing is in jeopardy over how she is seen to react. And so After the Hunt feels like what you get when you emulate Todd Fields’ terrific TÁR (2022) minutely, yet somehow miss its savagery. 

Roberts is certainly game to rein in her natural luminosity and likeability for a role designed to showcase her range. Other characters contort their psychology into highly unlikely shapes in order to give her new notes to play off, and to yield plenty of the confrontation and self-realisation beats so beloved of Oscar-nomination clip-reel editors. Meanwhile, Stuhlbarg, a terrific actor is reduced to fey background gesticulations as Alma’s emotionally cuckolded psychologist husband, including one bizarrely motivated turn-up-the-music scene that looks lifted directly from Anatomy of a Fall (2023).  

And then there’s Edebiri, one of the most appealingly inventive and intuitive actresses of her generation. Her Maggie is unfeasibly wealthy but also Black, gay and dating a trans partner, none of which accounts for her battery of erratic, self-contradictory impulses and behaviours. Instead Maggie becomes the unwieldy avatar for everything Gen-X doesn’t get about Gen-Z — which is, apparently, everything — with the blank incomprehension regarding the younger generation amounting to disdain, however much the filmmakers insist that they’re leaving judgements up to the audience. Not that it really matters all that much right now when America’s elite educational establishments are facing such existential threats that the relitigation of #MeToo talking points, like much in After the Hunt, feels way too long after the point. 

► After the Hunt is in UK cinemas 20 October.