After the Hunt (2025) Review!!

Synopsis – A college professor finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star pupil levels an accusation against one of her colleagues and a dark secret from her own past threatens to come to light.

My Take – With a filmography that consists of works such as A Bigger Splash (2015), Call Me by Your Name (2017), Suspiria (2018), Bones and All (2022), Challengers (2024) and Queer (2024), Luca Guadagnino has proven himself to be one of the best working filmmakers with a clear taste for risk.

Which also seemed like the case of his latest and possibly most starry affair yet – a twist on the #MeToo era in academia in the form of a drama that’s part soap opera and part philosophical meditation. Unfortunately, bolstered by a script that is under the impression that it’s more intelligent than it actually is, the results are nothing short of a rare misfire for a filmmaker whose body of work has been so varied and successful till now.

Written by actress turned writer Nora Garrett, the film operates as talky, heady drama that wants to get into the generational divide between Gen Z youth culture and pre-woke-era Gen X and Gen Y, but her over-intellectualized script ends up reducing its characters to broad annoying mouthpieces for these hot topics, who are bizarrely efficient enough to interrogate both the post-#MeToo context of how assault charges are handled and reacted to, while also untangled in tricky identity political inquiries that brush against race and gender issues.

Sure, there are some interesting ideas here like the corrupting nature of privilege, entitlement, toxic feminism and the ideological difference between generations, however, the film’s inflated self-importance not only overwhelms but also undermine its finer points. And bogged down by its 139 minute run time, it is disappointing to see the Italian filmmaker lose his signature nuance in what is his most yawn-inducing convoluted film.

Set in 2019, the story follows Yale philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) who is living a charmed life with her psychologist husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), hosting partying where she plays intellectual tennis with her colleague Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), with whom she shares a deep friendship and is up against in gaining tenure, and their students, particularly, PHD student Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), the type to shoot her hand up first in the classroom even when unsure of the answer.

However, the balance of her life shifts, when Maggie shows up at Alma’s doorstep next day and claims that a drunk Hank walked her home after the party and sexually assaulted her. And though Hank claims innocence, that Maggie fabricated the story because he discovered she had plagiarized her dissertation, Alma finds herself dealing with the impact on her impending tenure and the revelation of a dark secret from her own past.

What follows is a battle of wills. Suffering from a mysterious illness, Alma starts to unravel as relations between her and Maggie morphs into something more destructive. The film actually starts off well. As its title suggests, the film is more interested in navigating the fallout of the consequences rather than the act itself. For the first two acts, the narrative excels with a moral ambiguity and engages its viewers with snappy dialogue, superb cinematography and excitingly precise score.

All working together to make a film that feels far more intriguing than it has any right to be. It even moves beyond the simple binaries of innocence/guilt or victim/perpetrator to probe the thornier questions raised by cancel culture and the deeper roots of the trio’s desperation.

For Alma, it’s the ageism of academia that she feels has denied her work true recognition. In Maggie’s case, it’s the cross-pressure of being a gay Black woman in a white-dominated space while also coasting on the benefits of her wealthy upbringing. Even in the case of Hank, who’s the farthest thing from a one-dimensional monster, yet, he carries a real chip on his shoulder as someone who had to scrap his way from humble origins into an elite field.

But then as the third act begins, it starts to fall apart, collapsing into a tired mediocrity with a screenplay that is more often filled with academic debates about morals and ethics that will likely go over most viewers’ heads, unless you happen to be interested in philosophy.

Though it does delve into thought-provoking territory, it all comes at the expense of a misogynistic attitude, with a cynical, sometimes justified yet most of the time baffling hatred for younger generations. And after a while, it just seems like it’s going in circles, contextualizing the same detail about characters in different scenes.

To make matters worse, the film comes to a somewhat abrupt ending, supplemented by an epilogue that strips away the complex questions we should have been left to grapple with.

Performance wise, all the three leads bring in scintillating turns. Julia Roberts is particularly captivating as the conflicted Alma, who slowly begins to unravel as her own past traumas making themselves felt. She expertly captures the uncomfortable division between her words and actions. Andrew Garfield is believable and confident in a turn that is relentless enough to almost make one try to understand his side of the story even if Maggie has the more compelling argument.

Ayo Edebiri more than holds her own in such stellar company, even when her character moves in alarming, strange directions. In supporting turns, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny bring the much-need humor to the proceedings, bringing their own brand of lovable goofiness. On the whole, ‘After the Hunt‘ is a muddled cancel culture drama that boasts stirring performances but is letdown by its underwhelming over-complicated script.