Few filmmakers today are as deft at exploring moral ambiguity as Luca Guadagnino, and “After the Hunt” may be his most provocative work yet. Set amid the Ivy League halls of Yale, the film skewers the pretensions of academia while dissecting the tangled intersections of power, truth, and identity in the #MeToo era.
Anchored by a complex performance from Julia Roberts, this is both a gripping psychological drama and a daring intellectual provocation, one that refuses to hand its audience easy answers. It’s highly provocative and confrontational, which means this movie is going to anger and frustrate a lot of people on both sides of the political spectrum. To me, that’s what makes art so interesting.
Roberts plays Alma Olsson, a philosophy professor whose career and carefully ordered life begin to unravel when her protégé, Maggie Price (Ayo Edebiri), accuses Alma’s close colleague and friend Henrik Gibson (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault. As the university community fractures around them, Alma is forced to confront her own complicity both in the culture of silence that shields powerful men and in a haunting episode from her past that refuses to stay buried.
Written by Nora Garrett with an understanding of academic hypocrisy, the film is a pressure cooker of competing ideals. There’s feminism and ambition, loyalty and guilt, truth and reputation. Guadagnino directs the material well, using the elegant architecture of Yale’s campus as both a grand setting and a metaphor for the moral rot beneath the university’s intellectualism and pedigree.
And of course, there’s the whole notion of the slippery truth. The film refuses to confirm Hank’s guilt or innocence, instead placing the audience in Alma’s position of feeling unsure, uncomfortable, and complicit in the act of interpretation. This will really mess with your head in all the right (and possibly wrong) ways.
This ambiguity will divide viewers. Some will see it as an incisive critique of moral panic and institutional cowardice while others will find its refusal to take a stance deeply troubling, and maybe even regressive. The film’s depiction of a female professor who hesitates to support an accuser has already sparked debate about whether it undercuts feminist progress or simply acknowledges the uncomfortable realities of human doubt. Guadagnino seems to invite that discomfort.
“After the Hunt” is cinema designed to unsettle rather than reassure, and there’s nothing easy about watching the film. It’s talky, thorny, and often infuriating, but that’s precisely how it finds its power.
By: Louisa Moore
Screen Zealots 