“Against all odds, I’ve found myself in the business of optics, not substance.” Spoken by a peripheral character, this is the unassuming thesis of Luca Guadagnino’s latest film. “After the Hunt” is a gripping psychological thriller that weaves a complex web of power dynamics related to race, class and gender. In this campus drama set in 2019, philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) contends with the news that a favored colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) has allegedly sexually assaulted her Ph.D. student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri).
With a swooping score and cast of suspicious characters, the movie conjures emotion and suspense. Each character is hiding something, whether a mysterious condition or intrusive tendencies. The one genuinely good character in the film is Alma’s psychiatrist husband Frederick, played by a delightful Michael Stuhlbarg. Frederick serves as both the film’s moral backbone and comic relief.
The cast is compelling. Commanding the screen as an aloof professor, Roberts is particularly captivating. Garfield is another standout as a bona fide bad guy. In a role drastically different from her breakout performance in “The Bear,” Edebiri holds her own alongside this seasoned cast.
In “After the Hunt,” Guadagnino deviates from the tortured romances that define his work, such as “Call Me by Your Name,” “Bones and All” or “Challengers.” With this thriller, Guadagnino proves that his signature style, including lush visuals and distinctive needle drops, works in other genres.
As one would expect from Guadagnino, the film is well-shot and produced. Alongside his signature landscapes, Guadagnino employs more close-ups than usual, and in a cool twist the sound is primarily diegetic.
Compared to Guadagnino’s more subtle films, “After the Hunt” is highly stylized, tense and fast-paced. Dialogue-heavy scenes bounce quickly from character to character in a verbal tennis match. The best moment in the film — likely to earn Roberts a Best Actress nomination in the 2026 Oscars — is when Alma verbally conquers an excessively woke student in her philosophy class. Like the rest of the film, it’s brutal, cathartic and over the top.
Despite the strong stylistic vision and standout performances, the film’s script is weak. In dialgue-heavy scenes, it falters as screenwriter Nora Garrett overambitiously attempts to fit a critique of champagne liberalism, higher education and rape culture into a thriller.
For instance, the film begins with a well-choreographed, grandiose dinner party scene in which Maggie evades questions about her unfinished thesis and the academics trade familiar barbs about generational divides and pronouns. The scene exposes the characters’ underlying anxiety about the state of higher education and “the culture” at large. Alma and Hank are each vying for tenure, a central plot in the movie, and at one point, Hank claims that in 2019 it is easier to be a minority than a white man.
However, the dialogue is often so pretentious that it verges on satire. Even as he’s hysterically defending his honor, Hank speaks as though he’s impersonating a philosophy professor. It’s sometimes difficult to tell whether the film is being intentionally extravagant.
If audiences aren’t sure where they’re supposed to land, that may be intentional: the film’s opening credits are in “Windsor,” Woody Allen’s font of choice. It’s a confusing homage any film critic is sure to pick up on, designed to throw off audiences and directly implicate them in conversations of the #MeToo era.
“After the Hunt,” situates itself in the aftermath. The title asks us: what happens after the hunt, when the pitchforks are stowed away and the outrage dies down? Who survives — and at what cost? The final scene takes place five years later, which audiences learn is 2025 thanks to news coverage of the Los Angeles wildfires. This is the film’s implication: we are in the “after.”
