Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino has entertained viewers over the past few years with thought-provoking projects like Challengers, Queer and Call Me By Your Name. He undoubtedly aims to do that again with After the Hunt as it hits the 2025 movie calendar. Critics have seen the psychological thriller, and while they agree Julia Roberts is solid as a college professor with a secretive past, not all of them are on board with Guadagnino’s latest movie.
Julia Roberts stars as Alma Imhoff, whose protégée Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri) accuses Alma’s friend and fellow Yale philosophy professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) of assault. This leads to a dark secret of her own resurfacing. In CinemaBlend’s review of After the Hunt, Sarah El-Mahmoud says Luca Guadagnino has made another movie that feels like every frame is art, and the actors rise to the occasion. However, its substance is severely lacking, and she rates the movie 2.5 stars out of 5, writing:
‘The hunt’ the title draws you into is pretty much nonexistent. It’s thrilling to a point, until you realize the corners the story is running you into are uninteresting ones that not only don’t feel properly fleshed out but come up largely pointless. It lacks a true perspective on the issue of power dynamics or cancel culture, and then it lands on a middle ground by handing it over to the audience to decide whether it’s fooled you into thinking that it’s more heady than it is with whatever conclusions you may draw.
Tomris Laffly of RogerEbert.com gives the upcoming LGBTQ+ movie 3 out of 4 stars, saying the script smartly reveals the depth of its trio of main characters slowly, which keeps us engaged and questioning their reliability as narrators. Julia Roberts’ performance is one of After the Hunt’s biggest rewards, Laffly says, and continues:
Another reward is the movie’s clear-eyed reckoning with a time when most people lost the ability to hold multiple truths simultaneously. In that, After the Hunt, with a brilliant epilogue, isn’t quite about whether Hank is guilty, or about challenging or discrediting all the good that the #MeToo movement has achieved so far. Instead, it’s a movie that pushes us to be better, deeper thinkers and assessors. After all, an evolving movement as momentous and consequential as #MeToo should demand nothing less.
Nick Schager of the Daily Beast says movie lovers should “Skip This,” despite his calling it Julia Roberts’ best performance in years. It’s a “wannabe conversation starter,” Schager says, that introduces thorny issues but doesn’t explore them. The critic concludes:
After the Hunt’s worldview is cynical, and its execution is uneven and enervating. For all the sharp cutting and tidy framing, Guadagnino can’t figure out how to infuse the material with urgency. Consequently, even as Alma’s situation spirals out of control, driving her to take irresponsible measures to cope with her stress and agony, the film slowly peters out. It’s wonderful to see Roberts getting an opportunity to shine, but in the future, one hopes it’s in service of something more than just a pretty, paltry provocation.
David Rooney of THR says director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Nora Garrett seem convinced their exploration of power dynamics, thorny ethics and generational divide are current, but it actually feels quite outdated. The critic writes:
Given that Guadagnino’s greatest strengths have always been as a humanist, a sensualist and a bold visual stylist, it’s baffling what drew him to material so aridly intellectual, stark and emotionless despite trafficking heavily in trauma. It seems almost implausible that the gifted filmmaker who just gave us the sizzling buoyancy of Challengers and the heady intoxication of Queer could deliver something so dour and airless.
Ryan Lattanzio of IndieWire agrees, giving it a C and saying the ideas feel ripped from another era and slapped into After the Hunt without actually having anything to say. The critic writes:
After the Hunt ultimately isn’t against-the-grain enough. It strives for moral ambiguity, but ends up startingly morally stark, pampering the viewer against discomfort in a final coda that feels taped on, like after-the-fact reassurance. It pains me to take down a Luca Guadagnino movie — he is one of the best filmmakers working — but After the Hunt isn’t enough, its ideas ripped from an earlier time, transposed onto our own with a broad-strokes equivocation about what they want to say.
After the Hunt has garnered just 44% on Rotten Tomatoes, but despite critics’ issues with what the movie has to say (if anything), it sounds like Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield brought their A-games.
If this is one you want to check out, you may be able to do that now. After the Hunt opened in limited release on October 10 and will expand to more theaters with its wide release on Friday, October 17.