‘After the Hunt’ on Amazon Prime Video, a clumsy slab of provocation headlined by Julia Roberts
After the Hunt (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) is Luca Guadagnino’s third film released in the last 18 months, and it prompts one to wonder if being prolific sometimes comes at the expense of being great. The gifted filmmaker follows up THE best comedy in years, Challengers, and niche-y but fascinating William S. Burroughs adaptation Queer with this spiky 140 minutes of socially conscious provocation set in the heart of academia, starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield as Cyphers for Generational Malaise. Its insights, I’m loathe to report, are just this side of nil.
The Gist: It starts right at the start: Woody Allen Font in the credits. “It happened at Yale,” reads that Woody Allen Font. Then, TICK. TOCK. TICK. TOCK. We hear that. TICK. TOCK. Real loud. I feel like I’m sitting on an atomic bomb, waiting for it to go off. The diegetic music’s real loud too, and thank god, because it renders some of the insufferable 10-cent college words spoken by this roomful of lightly drunk bloviating academics ever so slightly drowned out. Nevertheless, they persist, droning on about high-minded intellectualalia, la-di-da, la-la, a lot of it to do with the differences between generations, specifically those applying to aging instructors and their decades-younger students, both of which are represented here among the party’s attendees. Also discussed is the possibility of tenure, which applies to our host, Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), and also Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), both Yale philosophy professors hoping to nab it. They aren’t in a relationship – this is Alma’s home, and her psychotherapist husband Fredrick (Michael Stuhlbarg) is right there – and they insist they’re just besties, even though it’s obvious they’ve been f—ing each other.
A key guest is Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), Alma’s favorite student. Alma is also Maggie’s favorite professor, sharing some mentor-mentee affection. A little about Maggie: She’s Black, queer, dating someone using they/them pronouns, from a rich family that gave Yale piles of money and she plagiarized her dissertation on virtue ethics. Am I forgetting anything? Should I mention her nose ring? Maggie uses Alma’s bathroom and finds a Secret Envelope while searching for a roll of TP. Note, she wouldn’t steal an old newspaper clipping from the Secret Envelope if it didn’t play a major part in the plot in about (sigh) an hour-and-a-half. Maggie then walks home, assisted by tipsy Hank. The next day, Alma gets home after a long day of grueling student debate slashed up by her brutally reasonable retorts and icy stares – her students like her, they really like her – to find Maggie outside her door. Maggie says Hank invited himself into her place last night and sexually assaulted her. Then Alma meets with Hank, who says Maggie’s making it up because he called her out for plagiarizing her paper. And so Alma finds herself trapped in some mf’in Chinese finger cuffs.
See, if Alma doesn’t support Maggie, her feminist cred goes down the toilet. If she supports Hank, that’s a de facto alliance with the White Male Cis Yale Patriarchy. And if you upset the White Male Cis Yale Patriarchy, you risk derailing your trip down the tenure track. Being in mf’in Chinese finger cuffs doesn’t help whatever’s making Alma double over in pain and rush to the can to puke every once in a while, something that’ll be a major part of the plot in about (sigh) an hour-and-a-half. (Yes – long movie.) From here, we witness firings from jobs, the pressing of charges, hair-splitting about what’s “correct” compared to what’s “right,” Michael Stuhlbarg being a raging passive-aggressive asshole, wide-eyed recognition that yes indeed this song playing in the bar is worth wide-eyed recognition (it’s Morrissey, or more accurately, the Smiths, and congratulations if you get the jokey reference, or reference-y joke) and my utter perplexment over Chloe Sevigny’s mousy bowl cut, which I’m utterly incapable of comprehending. So: ARE YOU PROVOKED YET? The movie sure as hell hopes so, since it’s been working so damn hard at it.
Photo: ©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? File After the Hunt next to Eddington as 2025’s leading tryhard films trying to wrap their arms around what’s wrong with society these days. One Battle After Another and Weapons approach unwieldy, timely material in far more creative and coherent ways. And Roberts’ character here draws several obvious parallels to Cate Blanchett’s turn as a morally compromised composer in Tar.
Performance Worth Watching: I will say watching Michael Stuhlbarg being a raging passive-aggressive asshole is pretty entertaining.
Sex And Skin: Nah.
PHoto: ©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection
Our Take: So. Is this farce? Politically charged soap opera? Or gritty drama couched in plush interiors of academia? Who can tell? After the Hunt plays like it ground up a bunch of ideas skimmed from social media aggregations of sloppy journalism, then left them in a big pile in the middle of the floor because it’s not sure what to do with them all. There were times when I paused to wonder where all this was going; in some cases, that’s a sign of a thrillingly unpredictable narrative, but here, all we can do is scratch our heads and wonder what the film is trying to accomplish. It’s also weirdly muted, with no real emotional handholds, so even base rage and irritation are off the table.
Guadagnino applies his typically admirable, sumptuous formalist visual style to Nora Garrett’s mile-wide/inch-deep screenplay. Thematically, the film is a grocery list of items tossed into America’s melting pot and boiled down to a flavorless, thin gruel. Ingredients: cancel culture, identity politics, race, the Ivy League milieu, gender, sexuality, musicians and filmmakers who made great art but are morally questionable, classism, privilege… what’d I overlook? Social media? No screeds about that here, although they should’ve squeezed a couple in and pushed the run time to three hours, why not. Nearly all the big, overriding philosophical sources of American societal malaise are represented, albeit with little insight, and no characters who resemble actual human beings.
Further muddying the waters are performances from Roberts and Garfield that teeter between their status as bona-fide movie stars and desire to transcend being the Pretty Woman and Spider-Man. Roberts digs in her heels and tries to tap into the heart of a shoddily written character, more of a confused avatar than an actual human being. Garfield plays Hank like he has 40-ouncers of Toxic Masculinity taped to his hands, and has no choice but to drink (his Big Scene is loud and nasty and representative of the film’s desperate need to needle us). And Edibiri is stuck playing a character composed of a bunch of junk tossed in a drawer and labeled “Gen Z triggered.” They all give it – if you’ll pardon me – the ol’ college try, but this screenplay does nobody any favors. Especially those of us who dog it out for the entirety of its two-plus hours.
Our Call: And I can’t for the life of me determine why Guadagnino mixes the music and background sounds so high in the mix, sometimes nearly drowning out the dialogue. Maybe he’s sick of listening to this shit too. SKIP IT.
How To Watch After The Hunt
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
