[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “After the Hunt,” including its ending.]
Over the course of nearly two hours, Julia Roberts’ character in Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” really goes through it. When the film, written by first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett, first opens, Roberts’ Yale philosophy professor Alma Imhoff is mostly concerned with a looming decision regarding her tenure at the Ivy League institution. Everything else in her life? It seems sort of great.
And then. As the film unspools, it simultaneously unravels nearly every element of Alma’s life. After a boozy evening at Alma’s, one of her favorite students (Ayo Edibiri as Maggie) accuses one of Alma’s favorite co-workers (Andrew Garfield as Hank) of a heinous crime. As we learn more about Alma’s own background, we watch her react toward both Maggie and Hank (and even her own husband, played by Michael Stuhlbarg) in increasingly alarming ways. Her health suffers. Her work suffers. She crumbles. And when Maggie, distraught over the ways in which her accusations have been weaponized against her, goes to Rolling Stone for a no-holds-barred interview that puts Alma in the crosshairs.
Well, for a little bit. The immediate aftermath of the publication of the interview sees Alma (who has already been denied her tenure, due to her stealing a fellow professor’s prescription pad to procure pain meds, oopsie) surrounded by angry Yale students, stressing her to the point she collapses. She ends up in the hospital, where she reveals the truth of both her ravaged health and a past love affair to her baffled husband, Frederik.
That would be a fine enough place to end the story, and in Garrett’s original screenplay, the final pages only extended that misery. In the draft of the screenplay she first sold to Imagine Entertainment before it landed on Guadagnino’s desk, Frederik actually leaves Alma, who resigns from Yale and then travels home to Sweden.
There, in the original script, she attempts to reconnect with the mother of her father’s deceased best friend (whom Alma had, by her own telling, a life-altering love affair with when she was just a young teenager). After the affair (or, let’s be clear, the abusive relationship) ended, a heartbroken Alma told everyone the man abused her, and even though she later told people she was lying. It eventually led to his suicide. But Alma has never gotten over the man, and considers him the great love of her life. His mother does not show up.
Alma also visits her aging parents and tearfully tells them about said great love affair. Her mom’s advice? No one ever gets over anything. How’s that for Swedish stoicism? Later, Alma returns home to New Haven, and testifies in support of Maggie. C’est fin.
But in Guadagnino’s final film, none of that happens. Frederik doesn’t leave Alma. She doesn’t resign from Yale. She doesn’t go home to Sweden. And she sure as hell doesn’t testify for Maggie. Instead, after we see Alma in the hospital, the film jumps ahead five years, only to find that Alma, once the subject of mass derision (on campus and on the internet) is now the dean of Yale.
“So, when Luca first attached, he basically said, ‘OK, I love everything about this film except for the last 20 pages,’” Garrett told IndieWire during a recent interview. “And so, it was immediately right out in the open that he wanted the ending to shift. Partially, because when you think about the reality of how life works, Luca is very intentional and also very committed to truth and reality and verisimilitude.”
The way the director saw it, Garrett said, was that someone like Alma would never just give up, give in, roll over, and run away.
“The idea that someone like Alma, who had been searching her whole life for this, clawing her way towards this, making so many internal sacrifices for this thing, would give it up so easily, felt false to Luca,” Garrett said. “It felt like a very constructed character turn, as opposed to a holistic one. Looking at the world that we have … it’s really hard to let go of your identity, and it’s really hard to let go of everything that’s been bulwarking that identity, just because someone else tells you you have to. He felt like Alma was more of a fighter than that. And so, that’s how we began sort of reconstructing the ending of the film.”
It’s not just that Alma has risen to the highest echelons at Yale, but we also catch up with her on a day in which she’s seeing Maggie for the first time in many years. The pair meet for lunch at the same Indian buffet where we earlier saw Alma and Hank having a fraught interaction. Both women have changed — not just in terms of their careers, but their sartorial choices, which used to be very aligned, all natty blazers and button-up shirts — and they seem happy to see each other, if guarded about the whole thing. Maggie is surprised to hear that Alma is still with Frederik, and Alma marvels over Maggie’s giant engagement ring.
Still, Maggie is clear: She spent a long time waiting to see Alma really taken down a peg. And while that ending existed in Garrett’s original screenplay, it’s just not the case in the final film. Some people don’t get punished for their misdeeds, and they certainly don’t learn from their mistakes.
“I think we’re all being careful not to offer some sort of polemic to people,” the writer said. “But I do feel like, to me, that ending scene feels very much like, ‘Ah, right.’ That is sort of what happens sometimes. Maggie says to Alma, ‘I spent so long wishing for you to fail,’ and I think that the truth of life is that these things we think are going to be seismic and dramatic, they can be internally, but sometimes there’s not quite the one-to-one ratio of retribution that we think is going to be there.”
Amazon/MGM releases “After the Hunt” in limited theaters on Friday, October 10 with a wide release to follow on Friday, October 17.