You do not need to have attended Yale, or indeed any Ivy League university in any East Coast state, to recognize the archetype that is Hank Gibson. He’s handsome, bearded, and young, though not nearly as young as the students who eagerly congregate around him, hanging on his every word. A philosophy professor at the esteemed institution of higher learning in New Haven, the gentleman is prone to using dialectical declarations and deep-cut quotes to make his disciples dizzy. “He’s Hank,” one character will note. “Everybody loves Hank.” His self-regard is high. His shirts are unbuttoned just a little too low. He’s played by Andrew Garfield in a way in which you can practically smell the pheromones wafting off the screen.
Nor do you need to have logged time in stuffy, cluttered classrooms to clock who a character like Alma Imhoff is, either. A slightly older philosophy professor who’s hoping to score tenure (though Hank is also in the running for a more permanent position within the department as well), she tends to bring more of an ice queen vibe to the metaphorical party, and a kind of prison warden authority to the literal parties she throws with her husband, a therapist named Frederik. Alma doesn’t just lecture about Foucault’s panopticon; she is the embodiment of that all-seeing, all-knowing theory. Her wardrobe is oversized blazer-heavy. Her vibe is “please try not to bore me so much.” She’s played by Julia Roberts as if she were a role written for Meryl Streep that’s now being played by Julia Roberts.
And — how it pains us to write this next paragraph, though not nearly as agonizing as it is to sit through the subject of it — you don’t need to have seen thousands, or even dozens, of movies to pick up on what After the Hunt is aiming to accomplish. (It opens in limited release on Oct. 10, and goes wide on Oct. 17.) A drama set among the intellectual elite that’s designed for maximum chin-stroking provocation, complete with an opening credits style that will seem eerily familiar to many, director Luca Guadagnino‘s hand-wringer about campus politics and cancel culture is definitely a cautionary tale, as in we strongly caution you against seeing something this empty and enraging. The film looks like a million bucks, has a high pedigree of talent, and mistakes constant poking for conversation, endless buzzwords for a buffet of food for thought, incendiary hypotheticals for insight. The promise is the kind of quality button-pusher Hollywood used to make 50 years ago. The result is just old-fashioned cinematic fools’ gold, in which sensationalistic blather poses as social commentary. It takes a lot of hard work and the perfect alignment of movie stars to make something this god-awful.
It begins at one of Alma’s informal get-togethers, in which both professors and pupils try to gain favor with each other in between boozy bon mots. Per usual, Hank is holding court on the couch. Alma sits off to the side, quietly admiring his gift of gab; the two are close friends, though there’s something about the way they’re constantly touching each other, or the odd lingering in their hellos and goodbyes that suggests intimacy, illicit or otherwise. Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) observes everything with a sense of bemused, resigned bitterness. Their fellow faculty member, Dr. Kim Sayers (Chloe Sevigny), trades looks and barbs with him. Every person is insufferable in their own unique way.
And then there is Maggie Resnick (et tu, Ayo Edebiri?). She’s a twentysomething doctoral student who’s pining for Alma’s approval. More than most, in fact — Frederik keeps throwing shade about how this bright young thing mimics his wife’s gestures and mannerisms, and he thinks she may have romantic designs on her as well. If nothing else, she’s alert to the changes in tone and topic in the room. Maggie also smiles tolerantly when Hank keeps his hand on her knee for a few beats too many, or leans in close during chats. At the end of the evening, Hank offers to walk her home. When they leave, Alma spies on them through the peephole in the door as they stumble out. Do we detect envy? Or maybe a sense of maternal protectiveness? Is she simply suffering from gastrointestinal stress?
Actually, Alma does suffer from ulcers, which cause her extraordinary stomach pain and vomiting at inconvenient moments, and cause viewers to wonder not if but when such clumsy symbolic traits will be trotted out in the future. In any case, Maggie doesn’t show up to class the next day. When Alma meets up with Hank later at the university tavern, he mentions that he believes this promising student has plagiarized a paper. She’s shocked, or pretends to be. Later, Alma finds Maggie waiting for her outside her door, wet and shivering. It turns out that Maggie’s nonbinary partner was out of town last night, so Hank came in for a nightcap after the party. Why not? He’s Hank. Everybody loves Hank. And then: “He crossed a line.” Maggie needs to say something to the administrators. Can she count on her mentor for her support?
Edebiri
Amazon MGM Studios
To accuse or not to accuse, to corroborate or not to corroborate? Those are the questions of After the Hunt, and the reverberations will be as earth-shaking as the volume of the ticking-clock score that Guadagnino occasionally employs for tension. Time is running out, it tells us, though admittedly not as quickly as our patience once the dogmatic back and forth begins in earnest. It’s a pity that, after an extraordinary run that’s included the HBO series We Are Who We Are, Bones and All, Challengers, and Queer, the filmmaker has broken his winning streak. Nuance is not on the curriculum here, it seems, and while it’s tempting to assign most of the blame to screenwriter Nora Garrett’s checklist of a script — toxic males, complicit enablers, overly sensitive Gen Z types, grumpy Gen X-ers, and your basic anti-woke blowhards will get their boxes ticked — there are directorial decisions that seem fit only to confuse or enflame. Maybe constant cutaways to characters’ hands during a key conversation is meant to illuminate what’s not being said under all that talk, even if it simply ends up being a lot of shots of actual hand-wringing. Maybe the purposefully ambiguous coda was concocted to prove some sort of Rashomon-style truth-is-subjective point. Maybe the annoyingly meta touch tacked on at the last second is supposed to be clever. We couldn’t tell you.
Everything feels staggeringly off in After the Hunt, from the tenor of the performances delivered by genuine screen talents to the ham-fisted way each new revelation ups the facepalm factor by 10. Both Roberts and Garfield usually rise to challenges like this, but they’re fighting against a tide of relitigated, torn-from-yesterday’s-headlines bullet points. Not even Edebiri, who’s great at giving you a lot with a little, can salvage a part in which a lot of cultural baggage yields extremely little real perception. Stuhlbarg admittedly steals every scene he’s in, serving every line with a plate of cookies laced with arsenic, though you wonder if the only direction he received was: “Good, now make it more arch.” There’s one particular plot turn late in the game, involving an incident from Alma’s past, that will have you exercising extraordinary restraint from screaming at the screen. Which, to be fair, is different from the gales of laughter you’ll experience when Alma, having hit rock bottom, must live through the worst thing a human being can fathom: They have an online Rolling Stone Culture section article written about them. You think we’re kidding. Spoiler: We are not.
A lot of this might have been forgivable, or at best recyclable as camp, if it weren’t for a nagging concept at the center of this corrosive bit of work. The notion that cancel culture has run amok, that some may feel entitled to hurl accusations that ruin lives, that certain agendas are always at play, that the kids today don’t know how easy they’ve got it — these are not new ideas, and have been used as talking points by conservatives and those who wish to make things “great” again ad nauseam. Yet somehow, it’s the way After the Hunt keeps suggesting that the reckoning around decades of power imbalances and sexual improprieties was simply a burning fever that needed to break, and that once cooler temperatures prevailed we’d all be well again, that feels downright offensive. This wants to be a #MeToo drama that forces you to confront both bigger-picture assumptions and your own biases. Once all is shrieked and done, though, what’s left is a faux-prestige screed that’s 100 percent #OhHellNo!
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