Desperate to be topical and provocative, but landing squarely in the realm of the flat and flavorless, Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” plays like a movie about seven years too late to the conversation it wants to have. In the post-#MeToo landscape, it fancies itself a bold provocation, but instead feels like a seminar paper inflated to feature length.
What drew Guadagnino—the stylish provocateur behind last year’s simmering “Challengers” and the vibrant “Queer”—to such a stilted, airless drama? Perhaps the allure of its A-list cast, which is frankly the only reason the film stays afloat. Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri headline, joined by Chloe Sevigny and Michael Stuhlbarg. On paper, that lineup promises fireworks. In execution, Nora Garrett’s screenplay suffocates them under a mountain of buzzwords and pseudo-philosophy. The film mistakes verbosity for insight and leaves viewers stranded in the fog of its own self-importance.
Roberts plays Alma, a Yale philosophy professor on the fast track to tenure who finds herself ensnared in a moral and institutional crisis. Her longtime colleague and best friend Hank (Garfield, all scruff and cigarette smoke) is accused of sexually assaulting a student, Maggie (Edebiri), who quickly galvanizes the campus, the school paper, and much of the faculty behind her. Alma becomes the reluctant fulcrum of a battle that tests her ethics, her loyalty, and her career prospects, especially as Maggie’s parents are major university donors.
It’s a promising setup: academia, morality, and power colliding in the age of public reckoning. But “After the Hunt” confuses conversation with commentary. It touches on every hot-button issue imaginable—gender, privilege, cancel culture, generational divides—without ever saying anything new or incisive. The dialogue is filled with pseudo-intellectual grandstanding, the kind of writing that sounds smart until you actually listen to it. At one point, Alma remarks, “Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable,” a line Guadagnino clearly believes is profound, though it lands as a condescending jab at younger audiences rather than a genuine provocation.
It’s the third film this year, after “Eddington” and “One Battle After Another,” to take aim at Gen Z’s supposed fragility. The difference is that those films engaged the argument in good faith. “After the Hunt,” by contrast, feels like it’s checking off cultural boxes to appear relevant. It’s a film obsessed with being in the discourse, not adding to it.
To its mild credit, the movie does create a few thought-provoking dynamics. Maggie is a queer woman but also immensely privileged; her accusations against Hank are deliberately opaque, forcing the audience to parse where truth might lie. Meanwhile, Hank insists Maggie’s allegations are retaliation for his plans to expose her plagiarism. The moral murkiness is intriguing, but the film refuses to commit to a perspective, instead flattening every complexity into vague moral relativism.
Alma herself has buried secrets that threaten to surface, and the film toys with the idea of personal versus systemic guilt. But even as revelations pile up, everything feels too manicured, too carefully staged. Guadagnino mistakes polish for depth, staging arguments about perception and morality inside chic living rooms where characters name-drop ancient philosophers like they’re ordering cocktails.
By the time the film’s pretentious epilogue rolls around, with Guadagnino all but winking at the audience to suggest that truth is merely a matter of perception, “After the Hunt” has long since lost the plot. It’s a movie about people discussing ideas, not feeling them. For all its talk of discomfort and confrontation, it’s afraid to truly dig under the skin.
“After the Hunt” wants to be incendiary. What it ends up being is inert, a hollow echo of smarter, braver works that came before it.
AFTER THE HUNT is now playing in theaters.