Review: After The Hunt

Image courtesy of MGM.

Here is an example of a film that should work so much better than it does. "After the Hunt" is the latest from director Luca Guadagnino, who is responsible for the great "Call Me By Your Name" and has been on a mostly solid spree for the past few years - last year's "Challengers" was especially good, while his adaptation of William Boroughs' "Queer" was overall pretty interesting. His latest is also stacked with talent - Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Ayo Edibiri, and Chloe Sevigny - and covers the timely and weighty subject of cancel culture.

And yet, the picture comes off as facile and self congratulatory for its clear intentions to rock the boat, when in fact it doesn't have much to say about its controversial topic and, instead, plays like a faux provocation. One of its biggest grievances is to exaggerate both sides of the particular scenario in the film to the point that it's challenging to spend close to two hours and 20 minutes with such obnoxious characters.

The film opens at a faculty party for Yale philosophy professors and some of their favorite students at the house of professor Alma Olsson (Roberts) and her husband, Frederick (Stuhlbarg), who's a psychiatrist. Among those in attendance are Hank (Garfield), a professor who has been known to get involved romantically with students, and Maggie (Ebiri), a student working on her doctoral thesis who appears to be fixated on Alma in some form or fashion.

As the party breaks up, Hank offers to walk Maggie - who is gay - home. The next day, Alma is confronted at her apartment by a distraught Maggie, who claims that Hank invited himself in for a nightcap at her apartment and, she suggests, sexually assaulted her. Alma's instant reaction leaves something to be desired and she suddenly finds herself mixed up in a classic he-said-she-said situation after Maggie goes to school authorities and then the media with her story.

One of the film's biggest misfires is its portrayal of - and seeming disdain for - its characters. Nearly all of the professor characters come off as smug and arrogant, while the students are portrayed as overly sensitive and entitled (much is made of Maggie's parents having been big donors to the school). The word woke is never used, but it feels as if the screenplay wants to invoke it. Meanwhile, Stuhlbarg, a wonderful actor, has seemingly been instructed to portray Frederick as aggressively awkward, especially during one WTF sequence in which he barges in and out of a kitchen, blaring loud music, while Alma and Maggie attempt to have a serious conversation.

Despite some serious problems with the script, Roberts manages to shine as Alma, a character who clearly has some baggage but is attempting to figure out how to navigate her way through the sticky situation. One of the mistakes the film makes is to ask us to sympathize with her character. On the one hand, it's not difficult to agree with her during a tense conversation with Maggie that she doesn't owe anyone her story - clearly, she has her own history that seems to haunt her - but on the other, makes excuses for a likely rape scenario and uses the word they to taunt a non-binary student.

During one of the film's more uncomfortable sequences, she dresses down an Asian American student who doesn't understand the context of the word other in a philosophy text they're discussing. This scene reminded me of a similar one in Todd Fields' remarkable "TAR," but the scene in that picture is provocative because it left just enough room for both sides of its tense discussion to not land on easy answers, whereas in Guadagnino's film it comes off more as just ugly.

There's a scene late in the film in which Alma does in fact tell her story from a hospital bed. It involves a past indiscretion that is significantly more compelling than most of the rest of the movie. Had this angle been the focus of "After the Hunt," a much better film might have been the result. Instead, it follows that scene with a vague, open-ended one in which two characters chat at a coffee shop some years later. 

Guadagnino is a very talented director and this film's cast have all been great in better movies. But this is an example of a good director utilizing weak material - the script is its greatest hurdle - and not doing much more with it than to provoke. If you don't believe me, watch the film and tell me what you think the opening credits are meant to invoke, especially considering the subject matter at hand. Only a talented group of people could make a movie that falls this flat.