At the top of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, the question “What determines the moral worth of an action?” is scrawled on a chalkboard. These words – though not necessarily emphasized as much as the incessant ticking of a clock (“Time’s Up!” goes the #MeToo slogan) or the decision to use Woody Allen’s preferred font (Windsor Light) – call attention to exactly what the film is about: the weight of an accusation.
- Release Date
-
October 10, 2025
- Director
-
Luca Guadagnino
- Writers
-
Nora Garrett
Guadagnino (Challengers, Queer) introduces the audience to his players through a party of intellectuals drinking, chatting about their work and the theory they’ve read and passively flirting with each other. If the Allen credits weren’t already a tell, this party soon will lead to a “he said, she said” situation when a student accuses a professor of assaulting her at her apartment. The accused is Hank (Andrew Garfield) and the accuser is Maggie (Ayo Edibiri), a philosophy student who lionizes her professor Alma (Julia Roberts), who finds herself caught in the middle of this situation due to her relationship to both parties.
The thing about After the Hunt is that it isn’t all that interested in this inciting incident, instead shifting gears to focus on the ethical conundrum that surrounds it, as well as a number of noir-tinged narrative threads that go nowhere. Rather than dive into the complicated sexual politics and attraction between the characters – including Alma’s husband Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg), Maggie’s seemingly romantic obsession with Alma, and Hank’s past relationship with Alma – writer Nora Garrett always comes back to the relationship between how different generations process, and eventually exploit, the things that happen to them.
This results in a film that is largely actors reciting their contrived lines as though they’re on stage, trying to ensure that even the back row understands that everyone has the potential to be bad. Even the visuals, a far cry from cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed’s music-video work or the exquisite beauty of Belly, never settle into anything consistent, instead oscillating between awkward close-ups on eyes and hands and distant shots of people chatting in populated rooms.
Roberts is the only actor to escape unscathed, her cold and calculated gaze feeling closer to the kind of sociopaths that Glenn Close or Sharon Stone once played than a more obvious point of comparison: Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tar, down to the very styling of her costumes. She’s not without missteps, like when the film forces her to cry out in pain from a mysterious illness or asks her to monologue about morality by yelling at her students. But it’s leagues better than how Garfield and Edebiri mistake rage-filled delivery for gravitas and how Stuhlbarg’s performance changes drastically between passive and aggressive, sometimes within the same scene.
Neither Guadagnino nor Garrett seem to have any grasp on what kind of statement After the Hunt is trying to make beyond exhausting obfuscation. It’s a film without purpose beyond empty provocation, the equivalent of a guy who says “debate me” before devolving into an argument about how everyone is capable of being bad. The script is populated by quotes that feel contemptuous of those working to shift cultural norms, having people lazily deliver lines like “not everything is supposed to make you feel comfortable” as though they’re meaningful and not what you’d find a bot on Twitter saying after using a slur. Its “all sides are bad” approach occasionally leads to some amusing jokes: Take Chloë Sevigny’s Kim, a fun if slight character, finding glee in hearing The Smiths at a bar and noting that Morrissey’s been canceled. But it largely remains in the thuddingly obvious terrain of having characters say things like, “I’ve found myself in the business of optics, not substance,” without a hint of irony.
There’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before, down to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross trying to emulate the brooding oppressive tones of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and a soundtrack that never goes beyond collecting great tracks that sometimes confuse the film’s tone. Look at the way Guadagnino weaves in John Adams’ existing pieces: in I Am Love they were weaponized for maximum emotional impact, but, here, something like Adams’ “City Noir III. Boulevard Night” feels like a cheap way of pushing the film’s shallow thriller elements. Even the use of pieces from Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer, itself a controversial work, feels like a pointed reminder of the film’s disinterest in staking any claims.
Every bit of After the Hunt calls attention to itself. This is a movie that features multiple shots of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, a book about bourgeois ethics, as its bourgeois characters wake up to argue about ethics. And perhaps the joke is on those of us who can recognize all these niche references that surround these intellectuals. But these kinds of minutiae become what one focuses on once one’s eyes have glazed over at people passive-aggressively interacting with each other. Every time the audience tries to grasp a narrative thread, it’s immediately discarded or put on the back burner in order to focus on characters regurgitating the same ethical arguments that boil down to doing whatever one can to succeed, even if it comes at the expense of others.
This semi-nihilistic argument is all that After the Hunt has to offer as it continues to spin its wheels for 139 minutes, actively sidestepping any of the minor conundrums it introduces. Guadagnino and Garrett want to be both mysterious and obvious, both provocative and non-inflammatory, so much so that it lands the film in a no-man’s land of purpose. It would be one thing if any of the film’s thriller elements felt well-developed in spite of never once engaging with its own racial, sexual, or class politics. But everyone involved seems uninterested in those questions. The film is as empty as the pseudo-intellectual arguments in its opening scene, and by the time Luca Guadagnino says “cut” at the end of the film (something he purposely left in, as though provoking the audience to react with an eye roll), the only thing After the Hunt leaves one asking is, “who the fuck cares?”
From Amazon MGM Studios, After the Hunt opens in theaters on October 10.