Content warning: This review contains mentions of sexual assault.
If you leave Luca Guadagnino’s new film believing any of its characters, you’ve watched it wrong. “After the Hunt” refuses to defend a single narrative, a fact that’s obvious from the Woody Allen-style opening credits to the fact that it takes place in 2019, a year marked by generational divides and intense cancel culture. The film is all the better for it.
This new psychodrama, which opened the 63rd New York Film Festival, plays out behind the gates of the Yale University philosophy department. One night, professor Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts) hosts an unassuming, lively dinner party for her colleagues. In attendance are stubborn personalities like professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) and PhD student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), Alma’s star student. The night, full of fervent debate about the place of “white, cis men” in academia, takes a dark turn. A drunken Hank walks Maggie back to her apartment and the next day, Maggie alleges he sexually assaulted her.
As Maggie’s mentor and a suspiciously good friend of Hank’s, Alma gets caught in the crosshairs of this grave accusation. As the investigation mounts, a barrage of double truths and secrets from her childhood threaten to tear Alma’s life apart.
“After The Hunt” revels in its ability to question its characters’ integrity, a quality heightened by Guadagnino’s expertise in crafting tense environments. Conversations are framed like interrogations. Guadagnino calls your full attention to individual narratives, prompting the audience to be skeptical. It prevents any immediate reactions to a testimony or confession, with the audience busy scrutinizing the characters’ purported motives.
The respective scenes where Maggie and Hank explain their versions of what happened that fateful night make this subliminal messaging abundantly clear. Alma’s stone-cold face reflects on mirrors around Hank as he stuffs himself with tandoori chicken and calls Maggie’s accusations an “utter fabrication.”
Truth remains unattainable, a reality echoed by Malik Hassan Sayeed’s frenetic cinematography. His use of whip pans between characters holds the audience exclusively to the conflicts unfolding in real time, rather than inviting us to process what’s said.
In the absence of truth, “After The Hunt” renders everyone susceptible to each character’s manipulation. Garfield steps out of his good-guy typecast and plays up Hank’s sinister charisma, where coy banter snaps into vitriolic insults. He claims to uplift women in his field while calling them “bitches” in the same breath, begging Alma to believe that Maggie is only accusing him because he accused her of plagiarism.
In a press conference with WSN, Garfield called Hank a “provocateur.”
“He’s acutely aware of the concept of likability, what it means to be likable and what the culture requires of one to be likeable,” Garfield said. “He enjoys playing with his own relationship to that.”
Edebiri counters Garfield’s suaveness with her anxious Maggie, whose lip trembles and eyes skitter when Alma begins to doubt her accusations. Despite her inferiority as a student, Maggie’s parents are wealthy Yale donors, a privilege that emboldens her to weaponize her status as a black queer woman and pressure the institution into firing Hank.
Roberts’s stoic Alma wrestles with these clashing energies. She’s well-liked across her department and is on track for tenure, yet privately fixates on the attention she gets from Hank and Maggie. Their conflict eats away at her: She clutches her stomach between lectures and chokes down opioids when nobody’s looking.
Neither the audience nor Alma knows what truly happened, leaving no shortage of questions. The camera captures intimate glances and lingering hands, but so does Alma’s husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), who rebukes Alma’s inability to practice the objectivity she preaches. She instead shirks her husband’s words and plays both sides, desperate for the academic — and even romantic — validation Maggie and Hank provide.
Guadagnino explained how the characters’ “pursuit of affirmation of self” is a central theme in “After The Hunt.”
“All of these people are isolated in their own individuality,” Guadagnino said. “There’s an intimacy that is fake, and the actual dynamic is of prevailing onto one another. You have to come to terms with yourself, and then come to a breaking point. In this movie in particular, intimacy is the breaking point.”
The closer characters get to their breaking points, the more captivating “After The Hunt” becomes. NYU alum Nora Garrett’s screenplay juxtaposes Yale’s mythic reputation with its turbulent culture, using the institution as a battleground for conflicting ideologies. But the film’s allure doesn’t come from its specificity or its entertainment value. The more “After The Hunt” throws at you, the more you realize that this setting and these conflicts are as unimportant as the truth of what actually happened that night between Hank and Maggie. We only care because they do.
“After The Hunt” opens in theaters this Friday, Oct. 10.
Contact Dani Biondi at [email protected].