Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt,” a drama of sexual accusation and academic scheming set within the rarified cloisters of Yale University, is a movie that has some very good acting, an impressively dark and foreboding visual palette, and a psychologically tense atmosphere of mystery and suspense. It’s a movie that taps into current questions of social justice and sexual morality, and it’s willing to come up with answers that cut against the prevailing orthodoxies. Julia Roberts, as a grimly ambitious philosophy professor who has more to say about Michel Foucault than she does about her own (hidden) life, acts with a coldly compelling sardonic spikiness. All of which makes “After the Hunt,” if nothing else, an urgent and provocative conversation piece.
At the same time, there are many moments in the film — a scene here, an encounter there — that are likely to leave viewers scratching their heads, thinking something along the lines of, “Wait a minute. What just happened?” And that isn’t the sort of thing you want drifting through your mind when you’re watching a realistic academic soap opera, even one that’s cultivating a certain air of enigma. “After the Hunt” has been made with a fair amount of craft and intrigue, but it’s also a weirdly muddled experience — a tale that’s tense and compelling at times, but dotted with contrivances and too many vague unanswered questions. That’s why, in the end, it’s a less than satisfying movie. Do not expect box-office fireworks.
The first sign that Guadagnino is going to be pushing back against aspects of the #MeToo revolution is the opening credits. They’re a direct facsimile of Woody Allen’s fabled credits: the distinctive white Windsor Light font lettering on a black background, the cast listed in alphabetical order, all accompanied by an old jazz standard. When you deliberately mimic the aesthetic of Woody Allen’s credits in a movie that’s going to turn on an issue of sexual accusation, you’re kind of declaring where you come from.
That said, “After the Hunt” is not an overtly dogmatic movie. (Maybe covertly.) The film was written by Nora Garrett, an actor making her screenwriting debut, and it’s full of sharply witty and brittle exchanges that effectively conjure the backbiting showboat intellectualized rigor of the academic world. Guadagnino, even though he’s dealing with hot-button issues here, has not made some glorified TV-movie that spells everything out. Quite the contrary: “After the Hunt” fills in what’s happening with every character bit by bit, allowing each of them to exist in their own zone of teasing uncertainty. The cinematography, by Malik Hassan Sayeed, has a documentary-like precision combined with a somber stateliness. (Even a dank college bar is shot with visual gravitas.) Early on, there’s a party sequence set in the home of Roberts’ Alma Imhoff, who’s the film’s central character, and for a moment we may think we’re at the Yale Club, because the place looks so damn huge, with high ceilings and long hallways and a giant kitchen.
As the characters tweak each other, lobbing “friendly” putdowns back and forth, we feel like we’re being drawn into a kind of maelstrom, with all sorts of underlying tensions at play. Alma, a popular teacher, is married to Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a bearded psychoanalyst she treats as not nearly as important as she is; he responds by baiting her with emasculated impishness and then skulking off to make cassoulet. It’s no wonder she’d rather flirt with Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), her fellow professor and longtime close friend, who views every conversation he’s in as a cutting form of competition.
These two, however, really are competing. They’re both up for tenure, and there’s some tasty badinage about what will happen to their alliance if only one of them gets it — and also about whether Alma’s gender will help put her over. (She rejects this idea as the old sexism.) For a while, both profs make a show of fawning over Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a graduate student who is hard at work on her philosophy thesis; Alma is her official mentor (what we used to call a thesis adviser). It all seems chatty and effervescent enough until the party winds down, and Maggie and Hank walk out together. Though we never see what happens, the two wind up going to Maggie’s apartment for a nightcap (her roommate and trans romantic partner is away), and that’s where the film’s pivotal event takes place.
A night or two later, Maggie shows up at Alma’s house, distraught, claiming that when they were in the apartment, Hank sexually assaulted her. Alma questions her for a moment, because the man being accused is her close friend, but even her slight skeptical instinct is greeted by Maggie as a potential betrayal. They are both women; it’s core to Maggie that she be believed and supported. At this point, the audience has no clear idea of what actually went on. But then Hank asks Maggie to meet him in his favorite haunt: an Indian restaurant situated in a renovated silver diner. As he wolfs down his tandoori chicken, he tells his version of the story: that Maggie, he discovered, had plagiarized much of her thesis, and that he’d confronted her with this accusation when they were in her apartment, and that she fabricated the story of assault in order to squirm out of being caught for what she did.
There are notes of ambiguity in “After the Hunt,” but it’s my reading of the film that we’re meant to believe Hank. The audience is cued to understand that he could effectively demonstrate the plagiarism charge, and when Hank talks about how in this situation he has become an instant male-predator cliché, damned regardless of what he says, I think the film expects us to connect with the righteous rage that Andrew Garfield expresses and to take what he’s saying on the level. At this point, though, we still think we’re going to be watching some sort of he said/she said procedural played out in an academic setting.
But “After the Hunt” is not that kind of movie. Alma has a meeting with the Dean of Humanities, and she tells him that she believes Maggie. It’s clear that she’s lying (and a revelation later in the film about the plagiarism only confirms it), yet the scene is quite strange. She has decided to lie because if she defends Hank in a witch-hunt atmosphere, she feels like she could do herself damage. But Julia Roberts plays it all in a way that’s so emotionally neutral that we hardly register Alma’s treachery — we don’t feel it.
That said, the first thing to happen in “After the Hunt” that left me perplexed was when Hank bursts into Alma’s classroom, desperate to talk, and then, in the hallway, he tells her that he was fired. Yes, people are sometimes dropped from a career position after a sexual accusation (notably in the entertainment industry). But as much as “After the Hunt” is ramping up an outcry against unfair cancellation, this is still the Ivy League. We’d been told, and would expect, that there would be an investigation and a hearing. But the film wastes no time washing Hank out of the picture.
The hunt, it would seem, is over. The heart of the movie, as its title suggests, takes place after that, and this is where the drama becomes murky, in part because it’s about too many things at once. Alma has a dark secret from her past (one that echoes the film’s central situation), and while that’s fair dramatic game, it’s first hinted at in one of the flimsiest contrivances I’ve seen in a long time, with Maggie using the restroom during that opening party…where she just happens to find…the envelope of evidence…that Alma keeps taped to the ceiling of the toilet-paper closet!
There’s more. Alma is racked by spasms of abdominal pain, which cause her to have violent vomiting fits (I think we’re supposed to take this pain as metaphorical), and instead of consulting, you know, a doctor, she’s become a pharmaceutical pain-killer junkie who forges prescriptions from the pad of Dr. Kim Sayers, the school physician who happens to be her pal (she’s charmingly played by Chloë Sevigny in the world’s ugliest haircut). We could write this off as a dysfunctional eccentricity, were it not for the fact that a giant plot development hinges on it. It has to do with Alma’s tenure, an issue that was already all twisted up with the sexual accusation.
The more the movie goes on, the more Alma seems a monster of single-minded drive. If “After the Hunt” has an obvious cinematic model, it’s “Tár,” also a kind of predatory mystery in which Cate Blanchett played a star of her own classical world who was a monster of ego. The movie, in the spirit “Tár,” gets in some pithy slaps at things like gender pronouns and rich-kid privilege; it’s also got a spooky modernist soundtrack (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross). But “Tár,” which also chafed against the impulse toward cancellation, always kept you in touch with what was going on inside Lydia Tár. In “After the Hunt,” Julia Roberts’ performance is impressively addled — now soft, now prickly, now saturnine, now lashing out — but for all that her Alma remains an opaque presence. Too often, the filmmakers don’t clarify what’s going on with her; we have to sort of decipher the situations and piece them together. She’s a character of supreme selfishness who undermines her own interests, and while there’s an abstract explanation for that (it relates to her dark secret), it adds up on paper more than it does as lived-in drama.
Of course, maybe the reason that “After the Hunt” winds up being oblique to a fault is that on some level the film is working to understate its ideological thrust. On the one hand, it does an effective job of characterizing Maggie as a corrupt paragon of “woke” values: Ayo Edebiri, with her circumspect smile, plays her as impeccably pious, never more so than when it turns out that Maggie is a rich kid whose parents are Yale’s wealthiest endowment benefactors. Her moral entitlement fuses with her aristocratic entitlement; that’s why she thinks she’s entitled to lie. But as the scandalous secrets of Alma’s past emerge, the film ultimately reveals that it’s going up against the entire ethos of “believe all women.” If you’re going to question that aphorism, then surely there’s a way to do it that’s more coherently plausible and less reductive.
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