Luca Guadagnino makes impeccable movies. No matter what their relative merits, every aspect of his work reveals conscious, detailed choices. No matter how complex the emotions of his characters, his direction exhibits a distinct vision.
After the Hunt immerses us in the world of academe–specifically, Yale University in 2019. The #MeToo movement and D.E.I. initiatives are the norm, and the onset of COVID is still several months away. The narrative revolves around Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), a Swedish-American philosophy professor who commands her classrooms and her lavish dinner parties, co-hosted with her psychoanalyst husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg). Her younger colleague and friend, Hank (Andrew Garfield), also serves as a competitor in their race for tenure. A promising doctoral candidate, Maggie (Ayo Edibiri), complicates all of their lives, ultimately polarizing the entire campus community. Mind you, none of these people can be entirely trusted.
First-time screenwriter Nora Garrett has conceived a plot that constantly pivots from one relationship to another. It engages issues of power, gender, race, intellect, privacy and sex. Paradoxically, the more dense and convoluted the story becomes, the more compelling it becomes. The script parodies these self-important characters and their insular world, but it also elicits their vulnerability and humanity. You want to know what will happen to them, even if it tries your patience.
Luca Guadagnino first came to international attention with his Desire trilogy: I Am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2015) and Call Me By Your Name (2017), for which the venerable James Ivory claimed the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. (It also introduced the Oscar-nominated Timothée Chalamet to a wide public.) All three of those pictures are set in the director’s native Italy, and all are drenched in sensuality. Secrets and their revelations play a decisive part in their stories, along with dubious or illicit relationships.
By contrast, After the Hunt plays out in the Ivy League, a bastion of money, privilege and opportunity. Julia Roberts’ Alma doesn’t just appear in a space or a scene; she makes entrances. She galvanizes attention, as when she breezes into a classroom and invokes the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s “Panopticon.” She wears blazers and slacks with button-up blouses, often in white or cream-colored ensembles, a symbol of purity concealing a troubled past and a compromised future. She qualifies for soft lighting and a gauzy appearance. She is to teaching what Cate Blanchett was to conducting in Tár (2022).
Maggie, who hails from a family of wealthy benefactors to the university, admires Alma and wants to emulate her, after a fashion. She dresses like her, and she clearly feels a more than academic attraction to her. But she has her own agenda–”provocative discontent”--aligned to her race, gender, generation and fluid view of feminism. Eventually, Guadagnino treats her to rather garish closeups appropriate for a horror film.
Hank, too, has a cozy relationship with Alma at the outset. They comfortably occupy the same sofa at the Imhoff residence, trading cigarettes, cocktails and discreet physical contact. Frederik, the devoted but largely neglected husband–Alma confesses to him, “I wonder if I can be cold sometimes”--takes apparent delight in parsing the various forms of sycophancy his wife inspires. Only one character, the campus therapist Dr. Kim Sayers (played by Guadagnino regular Chloë Sevigny), manages to remain strategically and amusingly aloof.
The intensity builds after an allegation of sexual assault, less precisely characterized by the alleged victim as “crossing the line.” Allegiances are tested as the plot thickens, to coin a phrase. Yet here your loyalty to the screenwriter and the filmmaker is seriously challenged as well. In trying to tell a complex story, they dabble in moral relativity. Some moments and reactions come across as over-wrought, even ludicrous–Hank really doesn’t like to lose, as it turns out–while others muddy the ethical waters without offering any clarity or consistency to the characters’ motivations. Perhaps we should bear in mind Dean Thomas’ suggestion to Alma that the university is often much more about optics than substance.
As for those optics, director Guadagnino and cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, an award-winning music video collaborator with Beyoncé and Rihanna, have given After the Hunt a decidedly European sensibility. (Although set at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, the movie was actually shot at Cambridge University in England.) The camera lingers, probes, swirls and retreats. It gives certain conversations a decidedly claustrophobic feel, while making roomfuls of people appear threatening in an Alfred Hitchcock or Claude Chabrol kind of way. Combined with sometimes abrupt edits and fadeouts, all of this craft lends the film the flavor of a mostly non-violent, classic Italian giallo, except for one disturbing scene involving Alma and Hank.
You’ll get your share of hands in this picture. Guadagnino returns to them repeatedly, both as a means of accenting words or as a sign of ulterior motives. The digits don’t lie. You just need to interpret them.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the composing duo who also scored TRON: Ares, have provided suitably unsettling music here. It frequently appears on the soundtrack a beat before or after audience expectations, with its string, woodwind and percussive elements vying for attention.
Finally, there are the credits, rendered in the Windsor Light font, with the cast listed in alphabetical order and a jazz standard in the background–an approach notably employed by Woody Allen, a filmmaker dogged by allegations of sexual abuse, which he strongly denies. This seems like more than mere coincidence. Then again, After the Hunt itself can readily be viewed as ethical posturing, as the story casts doubt on the reliability of every character and every deed right through the epilogue, even as it layers the narrative with sexual ambiguity, academic censure and drug addiction. You get to decide, in 2025, how much society has changed in the past six years, and whether this movie really sheds any meaningful light on it.
