After three back-to-back films fixating on the nature of human desire and love, Luca Guadagnino’s newest release, After the Hunt, forgoes his past thematic patterns in favor of a story meant to examine the ethical struggles of various power dynamics in higher education. Specifically, After the Hunt follows an up-for-tenure college professor, Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), whose protégé, Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edeberi), accuses her colleague and professor, Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assault.
One of the opening scenes foreshadows a critical issue plaguing the intentionally provocative script: Not only is every character hammered with a static set of beliefs, but almost every superficial question the story provokes has a forced answer without any engaging development. The first text the viewer sees on a black backdrop reads, “It happened at Yale,” which establishes the film’s prestigious university setting before the inciting incident at Alma’s apartment. Alma and her therapist husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), are hosting a party for the philosophy department with a literary salon-like ambience of elitism.
Alma is listening to a conversation between Hank and Maggie about the latter’s dissertation on “performative discontent,” or the virtue ethics of appearing moral solely to preserve a personal image. Her dissertation topic mirrors frequent questions the script also asks: Who is acting under the guise of integrity? Who is actually righteous?
Having Maggie’s thesis be so on-the-nose with the film’s messages is a choice that could have allowed for a satirical response or a more thorough critique of virtue ethics. Instead, like the rest of After the Hunt, her dissertation never becomes nuanced. Maggie notes it’s not complete when Hank criticizes how it only seems like part of an idea, and neither she nor the story is willing to come to any conclusion about what it means to be virtuous.
The rest of Hank and Maggie’s conversation shifts to how Alma and Hank are both in competition for the last tenure spot. One of their graduate students remarks that Alma should have nothing to be worried about, as the current culture has deemed the cis, straight and white male, such as Hank, the enemy. As a Black woman in academia, Maggie justifiably refutes this point as far from reality, and Alma says that this victim mindset is developed to take away from the meaningful work that those in lower social positions have to accomplish to be recognized. Hank bemoans how difficult it is to maintain an inoffensive character in the present political climate.
Aside from how cliched the actual dialogue is in this scene, each character occupies a straightforward archetype. Alma is the lone-wolf female professor of the philosophy department who, like Maggie, is rightfully aware of the hindrances her identity might have contributed to her career. Hank is socially privileged and is a brute when any topic of political correctness appears.
By the end of the film, nothing about the characters’ beliefs changes. Who is good, who is bad, who is deserving, who is selfish and even whether or not the rape happened are all verdicts made apparent if one has progressed beyond a high school level of contextual analysis. After the Hunt steers away from the gray in-between complexity a character might have by making it clear who is right and who is wrong with black-and-white evidence.
After the Hunt has little interest in exploring how #MeToo as a movement, or how sexual assault cases broadly, manifest in reality. It avoids discussing whether or not #MeToo has shaped a change in appropriate behavior in a professional environment or delving into Maggie’s internal struggles in the midst of an accusation. Hank is an unlikable, violent jerk, and the viewer (or the university, for that matter) has no real reason to align themselves with him. In actual high-profile cases, there is much more ambiguity. It would be interesting to explore how a student might navigate a case against a professor at an elite college — an environment primed with complicated circumstances and psychological struggles for dissection.
Rather than explore this, the story swiftly reprimands Hank and validates Maggie, and then it focuses on Alma’s response to Maggie confiding in her. However, this is where After the Hunt offers an intriguing idea. While it fails to uniquely address #MeToo or sexual assault, After the Hunt depicts a complex dynamic between two women of different generations and how they traverse their patriarchal world.
The intergenerational divide between Alma and Maggie is critical to both of their characters. Maggie looks up to Alma as a figure of success in a male-dominated field. Alma is not only possessive of Maggie as a proxy for her feminist image of female solidarity, but she is just as jealous of Maggie and the society she inherited. Maggie’s peers have been more progressive in dismantling patriarchal notions, encouraging and supporting women who speak out more often than they had in Alma’s young adulthood.
When Maggie tells Alma about Hank’s assault against her, Alma’s response is initially rooted in envy. She questions why Maggie would go to her first before any higher authority at the university, but Maggie explains her decision is based on her knowledge that Alma went through a similar experience. Alma responds harshly, casting doubt on Maggie’s accusation. She is aware Maggie has the proper tools to find closure and justice, and Alma acts with resentment because she never had the same opportunities or retributive policies that Maggie has access to.
Their dynamic becomes more multifaceted when the story hints at Maggie having a crush on Alma. With the sexual tension between Hank and Alma, the film now involves a messed-up but genuinely provocative love triangle between the three. Maggie’s queer relationship brings out boomer resentment from Alma; there are several moments where Alma debases Maggie’s relationship by questioning her partner’s non-binary identity. After the Hunt is a picture of the way frustration and envy can materialize in separate generations of women.
Unfortunately, most of After the Hunt’s runtime is dedicated to the banal questions of who did or did not do something. Alma and Maggie’s dynamic is cut short with a timeskip epilogue that smothers any development they could have had with one another.
An argument could be made that its innocuous remarks on #MeToo and sexual assault are decisive non-statements the film intentionally makes. With this reading, After the Hunt is supposed to represent a cultural and political climate where people are inclined to display proper morals without any deeper investigation or application of their principles in practice. However, like Maggie’s thesis, the point is an obvious finding without offering any resolutions about what to do in a society that operates so shallowly.
This trivial non-statement is made worse by having dialogue almost as trite as the script’s ideas. Like the party scene, other scenes meant to convey the characters’ profound intellectual abilities end up in tired discussions. The film takes place at Yale, but these supposedly intelligent individuals will make simple claims about the subjects of their studies such as “Carl Schmitt was a Nazi,” “Heidegger treated Arendt like shit” and “Freud was a misogynist” without any elaboration on why these are worthwhile points to make when interpreting their work.
These statements are only brought up to serve as examples of the characters’ surface-level moralities; they will acknowledge the evils of talented and influential figures without figuring out what they have to do in response. While this could be a succinct example of the script’s own commentary on ethics, this moment only forces the viewer to question whether or not any of these characters are capable of any critical thinking.
One could say the point is that these characters lack the ability to make sophisticated arguments, but then the prestigious university setting becomes difficult to accept. Perhaps, the script is saying that even at elite colleges, people still participate in narrow analysis. Maybe, they’re actually encouraged to limit their discussions. These infamous institutions have historically up-held a rigid social-order that prioritizes certain demographics over others. However, this isn’t the film’s intention: After the Hunt is not satirizing how higher education operates, because it treats the academic backdrop with earnestness.
The setting is used only as a tool for increasing the stakes of the situation. Furthermore, the film does want you to think its characters are smart and serious; their intellects are not only framed as vital components of their personalities but as the main reason why these people have achieved what they have. This becomes hard to believe when you only see these characters reiterate the most elementary rhetoric exercises.
The performances in After the Hunt attempt to compensate for the script’s shallowness, but ultimately, they are mostly blunders. Julia Roberts delivers a great lead performance, but she outclasses her co-stars to the point where it becomes hard to watch her scene partners try to keep up. Andrew Garfield goes a bit overboard with Hank’s douchebag-like nature, and this clashes with scenes meant to be intentionally tense and contained. In the confrontation between Alma and Hank, Garfield’s acting choices make Hank so abrasive it becomes eye-rollingly annoying to watch. While Ayo Edeberi plays any form of anxious behavior very well, she does not project the confidence or charisma that Maggie supposedly has. Her cadence makes Maggie seem more spineless than she should be.
Even the score, composed by the talented Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, is as lazy as the rest of the film. Their work has usually elevated Guadagnino’s pictures, but here, they continuously insert abrupt notes and sounds to create an eerie, uncomfortable atmosphere. This is a common technique, but like the rest of the movie, it is executed in such a predictable and boring manner that it becomes dull before the half-way point is even reached.
Luca Guadagnino is at his best when depicting the intricacies of a relationship complicated by personal desires and societal expectations, and After the Hunt has glimpses of what it could have excelled at. Rather than do this, Guadagnino’s newest film coddles the viewer with a benign but flat portrayal of sexual assault and how it might engage with the hierarchies of higher education. Opting to say nothing of value when it could go against the grain, After the Hunt is the result of moralism: disappointing, inept and unfulfilling stories for the sake of audience appeasement at all costs.
