Screening at Venice: Luca Guadagnino’s ‘After the Hunt’

After the momentous one-two punch of tennis love triangle Challengers and magical realist travelogue Queer, Luca Guadagnino tries to press his finger firmly on the cultural pulse, with a psychological drama about aspersions and accusations at an elite university. Unfortunately, he slips and presses the nearby self-destruct button instead. The star-studded After the Hunt has a lot on its mind about human complexities, but largely expresses these notions in didactic form and through dramatic conflict that all but resolves itself halfway through the movie’s languid 2 hours and 18 minutes.

The film is at its most intriguing in the handful of scenes that are stripped of all dialogue and temporal logic—like its opening montage, during which well-liked Yale psychology professor Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts) gets ready for the day and performs her duties at her cushy adjunct job, on the verge of being granted tenure. The soundscape is sapped of all sound, including music. A ticking clock harshly counts down to nothing in particular, creating an uneasy environment that rests on a knife’s edge. In keeping with the movie’s tensions surrounding modern “cancel culture,” it feels like something could potentially threaten her position at any moment.

Accompanying this opening salvo are credits in a Windsor typeface, a whimsical font that doesn’t remotely gel with Guadagnino’s stirring introduction, but one that immediately recalls about 50 years of films by Woody Allen, an influential director who has long been persona non grata. After the Hunt comes loaded with charged ideas about modern academia at large and how people deal with sexual impropriety. But it gradually loses its footing as soon as its characters begin to speak—usually in circular platitudes about youngsters’ affinity for “trigger warnings” and such. At a party hosted by Alma and her easygoing psychiatrist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), her peer and close friend Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) seems a little too loose, drunk and handsy, while her favorite PhD student Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri) tries her best to fit in as a young Black queer woman in a mostly Caucasian setting. The next day, Alma is trapped between a rock and a hard place when Maggie comes to her in confidence, claiming that Hank assaulted her that very night.

What seems, at first, like a complex drama about one woman’s split loyalties—between her protégé and her best friend, and between her beliefs and her professional reputation—very quickly comes down on the ostensibly “correct” side of things in almost black-and-white fashion. There’s seldom any doubt about what transpired that evening, and even Alma comes around to helping Maggie make her case, albeit imperfectly. The real drama of After the Hunt draws from more vague parameters, such as the characters’ social environments and the cynicism with which they wield the zeitgeist and its power dynamics to their advantage. This process, however, is rarely seen or dramatized and is mostly discussed and speculated on, as scenes remain largely affixed to Alma.

Roberts, for her part, proves magnetic in the leading role and makes Alma’s secret ailments—which result in her keeling over from chronic pain—feel like manifestations of remorse. Garfield and Stuhlbarg are similarly attuned to the wavelength of pure physicality on which Guadagnino’s film exists, and the actors find surprising layers to their characters, too. Sadly, Edebiri feels miscast, playing her part like a comedian trapped in a small dramatic room. However, the fault may not entirely lie with her; After the Hunt doesn’t often grant her the opportunity to live up to the complications with which her character is described by Alma, as a woman existing at a unique nexus of racial oppression and financial privilege. An early scene has her staring uneasily at African artwork in Alma’s living room, but just as Gibson and Alma accuse their students of performative discontent, so too does the film itself fit that very mold.

It is, at the very least, visually alluring at times—Malik Hassan Sayeed’s cinematography creates a suitably gloomy texture—but moments in which this façade is pulled back to reveal the anxieties underneath are few and far between. Even Alma’s backstory as it pertains to these accusations, the reasons for her trepidation in getting involved, and even her eventual self-sabotage in the professional sphere, emerge far later than would be dramatically helpful and feel untethered from the central plot.

What is most disappointing about After the Hunt is how quickly it settles into familiar rhythms, despite gesturing towards more interesting cinematic modes. The frame sometimes zeroes in on characters’ faces, constricting them, and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross go as far as to channel the classic melodrama of Bernard Herrmann and Max Steiner on a few jolting occasions. But these flourishes are usually fleeting. Nora Garrett’s murky script is unlike anything Guadagnino has attempted before, but the Italian maestro keeps playing the part of an obstinate student in one of Alma’s classes, reshaping the narrative into the kind of welcoming form with which he’s most comfortable as a storyteller—right down to Stuhlbarg playing the part of a soothing hand. The film may as well be titled Call Me By Your Shame.

What feels like it could have been a more dramatically rigorous tale about the ways in which environments and experiences shape people’s conflicting approaches to a changing world becomes practically pedagogic by the end, framing everybody’s actions as tainted, including student protesters so farcical they feel plucked from Eddington, New Mexico. After the Hunt means well, but its conflicts are so haphazardly conceived that it ends up making a mockery of the very themes it purports to approach with a deft and serious hand. Slowly, and then all at once, its grasp on reality slips away, only to be replaced by some fantasy version of a modern college campus where no one recognizably human is enrolled.