Luca Guadagnino’s films have always included edgy, provocative sexual situations. Take “Call Me By Your Name” (2017), “Challengers” (2024) or “Queer” (2024). Even his ventures into the strange – “Suspiria” (2018) or “Bones and All” (2022) – are driven by primal lusts filmed in a way that can border on erotica. Guadagnino’s latest, “After the Hunt,” deals with the politics of sex and ethical morality in higher education.
The film opens with a holiday party at the cozy apartment of a tenured Yale English professor (Julia Roberts). The camera meanders from the warmth of the fireplace and into the stately den where faculty and grad students engage in boozy intellectual debate. Robert’s Alma is the clear queen of the ball (it’s her house). Her suck-ups include fellow lit prof Hank (Andrew Garfield, “The Social Network”) and doctoral candidate Maggie (Dorchester’s Ayo Edebiri, “The Bear”). Hank’s waiting to hear if he’s been awarded tenure; Maggie comes from an uber rich family that has given generously to the school. It’s all a raucous who’s-smarter-than-who fun time until Hank walks Maggie home and accusations of sexual misconduct are leveled.
How those accusations get raised and how they are articulated is one of the strange and awkward aspects of the film. Maggie initially tells Alma in fraught hallway convo, giving no specifics, and doesn’t go to the police or administration. Later we learn Hank has been fired. The film wants to have hard conversations around #MeToo, race (Maggie is Black) and transgender equality (Maggie’s significant other is transitioning), but is unwilling to commit. It deflects and casts murkiness through the kind of oblique, roundabout dialogue that made David Mamet’s “Oleanna” (1994) so provocative, with its open-ended, he-said, she-said ebb and flow of gender politics and academic power structures – 25 years before #MeToo. Nora Garrett, making her screenwriting debut, is no Mamet. “After the Hunt” at times becomes stilted and implausible. Alma’s hidden past and the examination of race and racism are particularly shaky.
The cast does what it can with Garrett’s connect-the-dots narrative; Roberts, Garfield and Edebiri give their thin characters depth through gravitas alone. In supporting parts are Michael Stuhlbarg as Frederik, Alma’s lovingly contentious husband who demands attention as their relationship withers, and Chloë Sevigny as the resident faculty therapist, grounding the drama.
Even the score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, feels misused and intrusive. There’s so much to want to like here – and it does provoke – but it’s inchoate. “After the Hunt” doesn’t add much to a conversation that’s long been going on.
As a kid who grew up in one of the fading mill towns that fed into New Haven, I kept thinking to myself how the gritty, grimy glory of New Haven has changed: It’s clean and quaint, and I need to get back to a place that looks so great onscreen. Turns out the film was shot in Cambridge, England.
For What it's Worth 
Leave a comment