AFTER THE HUNT Reviewed by GREG KING
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Stars: Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Ayo Edebiri, Chloe Sevigny, Lio Meheil, David Leiber, Will Price.
“Not everything is supposed to make you feel comfortable,” Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) says to Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri, from the tv series The Bear, etc).
And this new provocative and challenging psychological drama from director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, etc) and first-time writer Nora Garrett will make many in the audience feel uncomfortable. The film itself is a contemporary morality tale that takes place against the backdrop of the hallowed halls of academia in Ivy League’s Yale University in 2019. After The Hunt explores themes of ambition, sex, secrets and lies, addiction, cancel culture, ethics, and campus politics. It makes for a heady but often uncomfortable mix that is sure to cause debate amongst filmgoers. Many issues are left unresolved, which I feel is a deliberate construct by the filmmakers.
Respected philosophy professor Alma Imhoff has recently returned to work after having time off for an illness. She is in the running for tenure at Yale, a position that is also coveted by her friend and colleague Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield). She is married to Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a psychiatrist. The title itself is an allusion to what will happen after one of the two achieves their goal and how that may impact on their friendship. But following a faculty party at their house in which she and her colleagues and friends indulge in some intellectual discussions Alma finds herself caught up in a moral quandary that has major repercussions.
Maggie is Alma’s protégé, a bright young student who is readying for her PhD. Her wealthy parents are major donors to the university. Maggie is also gay and lives with her non-binary lover Alex (Lio Meheil), a law student at the university, but she seems obsessed with Alma.
Alma is approached by Maggie, who informs Alma that Henry raped her following the party. This places Alma in a difficult position because she is friends with Hank and is unsure how to respond or support Maggie. Hank denies the allegations and instead admits that he accused Maggie of having plagiarized her thesis dissertation. And Alma, who carries a dark secret from her own troubled childhood, is not sure who to believe in this case of he said/she said. Maggie has accidently uncovered Alma’s guilty secret, and we are left to speculate how much that knowledge shapes her later actions. In the aftermath, reputations and careers will be destroyed.
The characters are deeply flawed and insecure and have their own backstories and issues to deal with. They are fleshed out by a solid cast. Roberts delivers one of her best performances here as the damaged Alma, but she also plays Alma as cold, aloof and distant and yet somehow brittle, making her one of the less sympathetic characters of her career. Stuhlbarg, a regular in Guadagnino’s films, is great as Frederik, and his reactions provide some comic relief from the tense situation. There is one great scene in which Alma and Maggie are having a deep heart-to-heart discussion in the kitchen and he keeps walking in and out delivering a petulant attitude to constantly disrupt the flow of their thoughts. Garfield delivers a more nuanced and complex performance here, but his Hank is sidelined for much of the film. And Edebiri is very strong in an ambiguous role; her motives and behaviour make her an untrustworthy character.
Garrett’s script is pretty dense, and heavily dialogue driven, exploring some morally ambiguous territory. Some of the dialogue comes across as pretentious and empty. But with its plot about how whispers can derail a career or a reputation, the film bears some similarities to the recent Tar, which starred Cate Blanchett, as well as inviting comparisons to David Mamet’s 1992 play Oleanna.
After The Hunt was partially shot on location at Yale itself, which adds authenticity to some of the settings, and Stefano Baisi’s production design is also very good. And it was nicely shot by cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, best known for his collaborations with Spike Lee, who gives the material a rather gloomy surface with muted lighting.
Despite opening with the ominous sound of a ticking clock, Guadagnino’s direction lacks that sense of urgency and his pacing is more pedestrian. And the film includes a brief, but unnecessary coda, set some six years later, that adds little to the drama that preceded it. Interestingly, the opening credits sequence, in which the actors are listed alphabetically, and the title font are both reminiscent of the way the titles are presented by Woody Allen in his films.
Ultimately though After The Hunt may not hold broad appeal for audiences given its cynical and rather dry examination of the state of discourse in contemporary America and its cancel culture and #MeToo movements. And its running time of 130 minutes seems bloated, and the film outstays its welcome by 30 minutes or so.
★★★
