Film
Julia Roberts shines in Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, an exploration of cancel culture that is hard to imagine even being made a few years ago. By Luke Goodsell.
Julia Roberts ripples with complexity in After the Hunt
At a press conference following the New York Film Festival premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s thorny new cancel culture thriller, After the Hunt, the Italian filmmaker dismissed the suggestion that his film – which tracks the entwined downfall of two Ivy League professors played by Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield – was designed as a provocation. “I don’t like to scandalise for the sake of it,” the director behind Call Me By Your Name (2017) and Challengers (2024) explained of his latest, framing it instead as a wake-up call “for all of us to listen to one another”.
Yet even as this stylish and sensitive work captures the fundamental lack of communication in our age of splintered truth, it also luxuriates in the divisive, raising the kinds of loaded questions to which it can only fumble for answers. Was the #MeToo movement somehow responsible for the amoral morass of the current moment? Can a progressive, nuanced drama tumble through the looking glass and into reactionary sentiment? Why has it taken this long for Roberts – one of Hollywood’s brightest and most beloved movie stars – to be given a late-career role such as this, rippling with darkness and disrepute?
“It happened at Yale,” announces a pre-title card, rendered – cheekily for a film about contested allegations – in what feels like a nod to Woody Allen’s signature typeface. Over the deafening sound of a ticking clock we meet the players, which first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett positions like generational chess pieces.
There’s Alma (Roberts), the brittle and jaded Gen X philosophy professor, in a loving if largely sexless marriage to Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg); her Millennial assistant professor, Hank (Garfield), all open-collar shirts and louche edgelord attitude; and PhD student Maggie (Ayo Edeberi), a Zoomer whose dissertation on “performative discontent” is emblematic of the blunt analogies built into the movie’s architecture. Both Alma and Hank are up for plum department tenures. Complicating matters, they’ve been having an affair from which they’re not quite disentangled, and Maggie – who’s queer – is infatuated with Alma. After a late-night rendezvous gone awry, Maggie accuses Hank of sexual assault.
The film takes pains to keep the truth at a distance, even as events snap into familiar shape. Hank is let go from his position amid a predictable rant about cis white men being the victims of a “shallow cultural moment”, railing against the “privileged coddled hypocrites” of a generation that the movie reduces to a collection of non-binary extras in mullets and knit vests.
Meanwhile, Alma’s reluctance to testify against her former lover puts her in the crosshairs – especially with a potentially damning secret from her past threatening to escape.
With its litany of he-said she-said accusations and its sympathetic ear towards those once easily dismissed as villains, After the Hunt is the kind of post-woke film that is hard to imagine being made a few years ago, at the height of Hollywood’s cynical identity politics and its necessary attempt to redress the industry’s fraught gender imbalance.
In the wake of Todd Field’s similarly themed – and far superior – Tár (2022), in which Cate Blanchett’s eponymous conductor is scandalised by allegations of abuse, one might be forgiven for wondering why we’re litigating the fate of yet another privileged white figure. Particularly when the film’s ostensibly unreliable accuser is not only Black but queer, a plagiarist and a rich kid whose parents are major donors to the school. It’s hard not to believe that Garrett is stacking the deck in a disingenuous, deliberately provocative manner.
While her screenplay’s diagrammatic structure feels strained to the point of incredulity – after all, what could be an easier path to thematic pointscoring than to set your drama in a philosophy department? –Guadagnino is a slippery enough filmmaker to push back against the contrivance. Goosed by a melodramatic score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who repeat their arrhythmic schtick from Challengers with orchestral flourishes instead of techno, the director finds unexpected contours to the drama, framing his players through keyholes, tracking conversations from odd perspectives or lingering on gestures that cut against the dialogue’s sometimes laboured machinations. At one point Guadagnino takes a played-out screen trope – a woman heaving her guts out in the bathroom stall – and frames it from a refreshingly unusual angle, favouring Alma’s patent leather loafers and the cuff of her trousers in a way that says much more than the action.
Even when execution doesn’t coalesce – as in his recent, overly mannered Queer (2024), or his bone-headed reworking of Suspiria (2018), which larded a perfectly mysterious fairytale with lumpen political metaphor – Guadagnino remains one of the few contemporary A-list directors who is exciting to watch, an auteur with a consistently playful, tactile approach to the frame. It’s hard to imagine another filmmaker soundtracking a dinner party conversation to David Bowie’s largely maligned Labyrinth track “Underground”, drawing out the song’s unsettling chilliness, or having Chloë Sevigny play the only progressive lesbian therapist with a framed Dirty Harry poster on her office wall.
In many ways, After the Hunt is Guadagnino’s take on the old Hollywood women’s picture – movies that would routinely afford rich and complex roles to its reigning divas – and a love letter to Roberts, an icon he clearly adores. In a touching moment at the aforementioned press conference, the filmmaker gripped his star’s forearm and declared, “I’m working with cinema itself.”
As if to prove it, he photographs Roberts beautifully, in ways that she’s never been seen on screen before. Drawn and sullen, with chic pantsuits and auburn locks scorched a brittle blonde, the erstwhile Pretty Woman star could almost pass for a Fassbinder femme in the mode of Margit Carstensen. A counterpoint to Garfield’s actorly pyrotechnics and Stuhlbarg’s warm, funny asides, her performance is the best thing about the film, compelling for turning one of Hollywood’s most irrepressibly bubbly screen presences into something icy and interior.
In a movie that interrogates the performance of public self, it’s telling that Guadagnino permits Roberts only one scene to unleash her famous megawatt smile and that when he does, it’s at one of the movie’s most contentious, borderline reactionary moments.
“You do realise this is philosophy class, right?” she admonishes a group of her Zoomer students, bemoaning their blinkered, easily triggered thinking. Then comes the grin: there and gone in a flash, as fleeting and enigmatic as a Cheshire cat – and as elusive as the film’s handle on reality. In a post-truth world, even America’s sweetheart has become a shitty woman.
After the Hunt is screening in cinemas nationally.
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