**/****
starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edibiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg
written by Nora Garrett
directed by Luca Guadagnino
by Angelo Muredda SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. “It happened at Yale,” an onscreen caption proclaims at the start of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, a handsomely-mounted but undisciplined culture-war sampler platter. The film is the unruly if rarely boring child born of the intellectual marriage between the Guadagnino who saw Dario Argento’s Suspiria and imagined a 150-minute adaptation about postwar Germany and longtime actor and first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett, who told BUSTLE that After the Hunt was inspired by her time in a pair of online philosophy courses in the early days of the pandemic about “how to live morally in what often feels like an immoral world.” What exactly happened to inspire a feature-length reflection on morality is not defined with much precision in After the Hunt, which prefers to raise an assortment of questions about race, gender, and privilege in higher education with the nuance of an edgelord podcaster thinking out loud rather than look directly at a concrete example of those mechanics at, say, Yale. But if a low-stakes psychological thriller about well-dressed academics in immaculate cream suits and rumpled chambray shirts with not one but two beautiful minimalist apartments is what you’re after, you could do worse.
Insofar as anything can be agreed to have happened at Yale here, it’s that following a boozy soiree at the home of philosophy professor Alma (Julia Roberts) and her cucked psychiatrist husband Frederick (Michael Stulhbarg), Alma’s doctoral candidate protégée Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) says she was sexually assaulted by Hank (Andrew Garfield), Alma’s colleague and her chief competitor for tenure. “What are you saying happened?” Alma says from the shadows to a shaking Maggie, who’s just shown up on her doorstep–Alma’s uncommitted, carefully parsed tone splitting the difference between supervisor, white liberal woman ally, and hopeful future university administrator trying to manage the inevitable blowback to the department. Maggie leaves the specifics to Alma’s imagination, which casts itself back to Hank’s prior sexual liberties and thoughtless remarks, and Hank doesn’t do himself any favours by immediately leaning hard on her to buy his version of events.
A rakishly handsome provocateur who dresses like a slightly elevated grad student with his jeans and messenger bag but is prone to making huffy statements about “the climate in higher education these days” (meaning you can’t fraternize with the students), Hank denies the allegation to Alma, with whom he has a relationship that’s part sibling rivalry and part playground negging. Maggie, he insists, as Alma looks on skeptically but receptively, is just a coddled rich kid and mediocre student who made up the charge when he caught her plagiarizing her dissertation. As Alma dithers about what to do with Maggie’s plausible but not rock-solid account (while considering Frederick’s contention that Maggie is only Alma’s favourite because she flatters her), Maggie goes public to a major magazine, dragging Alma’s reputation as a feminist ally through the mud and uncovering the well-kept secret of her now ex-mentor’s sexual exploitation as a teenager in the process.
Though the austere geometric poster that encases the four leads’ faces in a chopped-up rhombus suggests the salacious plot will serve as some kind of mysterious object for the spectator to mull over from one perspective and then another, examining each side of the central events one at a time, there’s not much to be said about the likelihood of Maggie’s allegations, and no Rashomon-styled depth to the ambiguity of how these events unfold. Either Hank did what Maggie said he did or he didn’t, and anyway, as evidenced by his explosive temper tantrums, huffy defensiveness, and casual line-crossing with Alma, he probably did something to merit his unceremonious dismissal either way. Alma’s annoyance at Maggie’s Zoomer discourse about comfort and safety, and Hank’s and Frederick’s insinuations about Maggie’s relative lack of merit as a grad student, aren’t worth much as debate topics, as we aren’t exactly privy to her dissertation and never get a sense of what she’s like in her field. So it’s hard to say how much of her success is down to her parents’ name on this donor wall or that one. An over-the-shoulder shot of her narcissistically scrolling reactions on X to her incendiary ROLLING STONE interview is presumably meant to serve as a smoking gun laying bare her self-absorption, but it’s hardly conclusive evidence that she’s anything other than a garden-variety online poster, dedicated to likes; who among us?, as they say.
For her part, Roberts is perfectly cast as the ice queen Dean-in-waiting, who’ll be damned if she’s going to be derailed by either her work husband’s misdeeds or her mentee’s possible victimization by same. And Stuhlbarg is a good match as the fussy, passive-aggressive beard who wears his best designer shirts to make stew and blast his terrible music around the house when Alma entertains guests he doesn’t respect, and who doesn’t go out of his way to correct his wife when she says she doesn’t deserve him. “No one is contesting that,” he says with a snarky flourish, after she graciously lifts her legs on the couch for him to slide under and get into position as her masseuse. But there’s nothing especially revelatory about their respective takes on Maggie’s crisis, and their own marital drama about Alma’s past affair with a close friend of her parents when she was 15–which she had previously reported as sexual abuse but which she now says she was a willing participant in, destroying the man’s life out of spite when he ended things with her–is glossed over with a shrug, as if Guadagnino is himself waving away the age-gap discourse that sprung up around the romance in Call Me By Your Name with a more unambiguously exploitative relationship. If Alma can see herself as the aggressor in her own statutory rape by a family friend, surely Oliver and Elio aren’t such a bad couple.
You can hardly blame Maggie for instrumentalizing her intersecting oppressions as a queer racialized grad student to squeeze something out of Alma and Yale for the damage that’s been done to her, since Guadagnino is also instrumentalizing her story to make some kind of anachronistic Woody Allen thriller with big stars in the present, years after Allen’s belated cancellation sent him first to Europe for financing and then into the wilderness of Club Random. Not content to only do Woody Allen redux–signalled not just by the plot mechanics but by the Windsor Light font credits, listed in alphabetical order, naturally–Guadagnino pulls from any number of reactionary-shaded little-stinker texts about love, morality, and Kids These Days, from Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco (why there’s Chloë Sevigny as Maggie’s oversharing therapist, with a Dirty Harry poster hanging in her office) to Todd Haynes’s May December, where Natalie Portman’s self-absorbed actress regales a high-school class with shop talk about shooting sex scenes. Between the discordant piano notes on the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score that recall Eyes Wide Shut and the queer-coded thriller beats about badly behaving academics on loan from Tár (which the film feels most indebted to), Todd Field, who plays a piano player in the former and is the writer-director of the latter, gets evoked twice. For good measure, Guadagnino borrows numerous fourth-wall-breaking, direct address close-ups from Jonathan Demme–on whom he wrote his undergraduate thesis–for Alma’s cross-examination of Hank as well as her later dressing down of Maggie, though one would be hard-pressed to find a direct line from Demme’s humanism to Guadagnino’s cynicism.
Fun as they are to compile, these influences don’t add up to much more than the sum of their parts. Nor do they make up for the often toothless, non-specific portrait of academic life in New Haven, which is unsurprisingly actually London. Quotidian life at the university is more or less well-realized despite that location dupe, save one clanger of a campus lecture titled “The Future of Jihadism is Female” because academics are woke bullshit artists, one supposes. Yet Guadagnino and Garrett’s characterization of these scholars’ work is pitiful, from Alma starting an article she’s writing with the title, like a freshman philosophy student, to Hank’s accusation that Maggie has pilfered her thesis from Agamben, a crime that would make her the first graduate student to plagiarize from a primary text that everyone in the field knows rather than a work of criticism that only a handful of people have read.
If there’s any bite here, it’s in the ambivalent coda. Reportedly, it’s the result of a massive rewrite at the urging of Guadagnino, who insisted that the script’s original ending, in which Alma lost everything, faced the demons of her teenage misdeeds in Sweden, and returned to Yale to vouch for Maggie, was too pat. The reworked ending finds Alma and Maggie meeting again five years later at Hank’s old off-campus haunt in Trump’s DEI-purged America to discuss Alma’s new job as a Dean, Hank’s successful reinvention as a political spin doctor, and Maggie’s relationship with a woman ten years her senior–the new Alma, albeit with a more palatable age gap. If too often the film seems to be snickering glibly at the weaponization of identity politics and the softness of the next generation of students, the coda suggests, not uninterestingly, that the cancelled don’t go away–they just write redemptive op-eds to herald the next phase of their careers, while the victims in their orbit, hungry and often imperfect people in search of validation themselves, are left to swallow their anger and get on with their lives. Now that’s something you can believe happens at Yale.
