“Isn’t it obvious?”
The question, volleyed by a PHD student at her trusted mentor, hangs in the air of a darkly lit stairwell as the latter, Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), presses the former, Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), for the precise details of a sexual assault that occured the night before. Alma is a steely Yale professor –– beloved ice queen of the philosophy department –– gunning for tenure at the same time as her sleazy sycophant Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield). Their thick-as-thieves peership poorly conceals an unconsummated sexual entanglement; whether they’ve been lounging too comfortably on Alma’s sofa or drunkenly dapping each other up in a campus bar, they end their encounters with a stifled kiss. After a charged faculty soirée hosted by the Imhoffs, Maggie took an already-drunk Hank home for a nightcap, where he, in her vague verbiage, “crossed a line.” Alma, rattled but calculating, asks what line she means, and Maggie answers the question with another question.
There are no shortage of obvious elements in Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt: nearly every one of its busy, manicured frames is rigged to underline a specific idea, dynamic, or feeling; its coterie of sharp-tongued philosophers ceaselessly spouts the language of textbooks, dissertations, and op-eds; and their conflicting psyches are plated with puzzles that the film can’t resist solving for us –– with one exception. The only point of obscurity in this trend-chasing, hot button pseudo-thriller is Maggie. When the young woman confides in Alma, her idol’s evident lack of empathy and tact is overshadowed by her own aversion to clarity. Suspicion and confusion cloud the proceedings thereafter, even when the truth of Maggie’s accusation is all but confirmed.
The first image after the credits (typeset, obnoxiously, in Woody Allen’s trademark font) is of an African figurehead perched in the Imhoffs’ salon, followed by a shot of Maggie regarding it blankly. This is our entry point to the film’s elitist, predominantly white milieu, where coddled intellectuals play devil’s advocate to sepia-toned rooms of captious posers and strivers. Though the loaded shot-reverse-shot initially seems like a gesture of alignment with Maggie’s perspective, the film proceeds to push it to the margins, prioritizing Alma’s increasingly fraught, and increasingly fogeyish, point of view. The earlier eyeline match is later rhymed with another exchange of glances between Maggie and the statue of a Yale founder (Edeberi points out in an interview that the man was a slave owner); these parallel moments of goading culture-war shorthand only serve to embellish Alma’s chicly styled and sluggishly staged descent from the top of the heap.
Embellishments abound in After the Hunt, a film where questions of style and staging loom large. Guadagnino’s latest is a remarkably assembled object; at nearly every opportunity, the director opts for a bizarre, alienating formal flourish, variably inflating and puncturing tension with little regard for pleasure or taste. Lensed rather strangely by legendary hiphop video DP Maleek Hassad Sayeed, the film toggles recklessly between doing the most and doing the least: lush, pointed close-ups on wringing hands and fretful faces frequently clash with slow, stilted camera movements and awkward high-angle pans; bustling wides are blocked so abstrusely that the subject is sometimes lost in the shuffle; shots consistently slip in and out of focus. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score frequently fades into the background, save for sudden bursts of orchestral cacophony (it’s fitting that this film lifts a sequence wholesale from Tár). Front to back, the technique is disorienting, embodying the film’s heavily marketed tagline “not everything is supposed to make you comfortable.” After the Hunt’s sensorial hostility toward its viewer is almost commendable, but these tactics are merely a vessel for hollow intellectual grandstanding. It’s a frigid exercise in blowing hot air.
The film is steeped in the overheated trappings of tasteless, low-brow thrillers of yore, but its script also smacks of a snobbish, verbose modernity. If anyone could have transformed this conceptual rift from a bug to a feature, it’s Guadagnino, a savvy and versatile stylist with a knack for garnishing mass entertainment with a twist. Here, the style feels uncharacteristically laborious, like a peddler who’s fully aware of his product’s defects (those sensational ‘80s and ‘90s thrillers didn’t run two hours and twenty minutes in length, for starters).
After the Hunt sports its broken taboos like merit badges, and criticizing such a brazen, goading project for its offensive qualities feels a bit like taking the bait. Indulge me as I bite down. Maggie is an avatar for everything pop culture can’t stand about Gen-Z, written primarily to be hated; “am I not owed this?” she asks when Alma advises her not to go public, a phrasing choice –– courtesy of screenwriter Nora Garrett –– that inflects an otherwise valid assertion with a pang of entitlement. Much is made of Maggie’s billionaire parents, who are some of the school’s wealthiest donors; her doctoral dissertation is apparently, and transparently, plagiarized (Hank tries and fails to use this to his advantage); she falls back on her identity as a Black lesbian every time she’s backed into a corner; her nonbinary partner Alex –– unflatteringly depicted as a vapid social justice warrior –– is convincingly assessed by Alma as a means to make herself more “interesting” by proxy; and even her septum piercing, a subtle disruption of a buttoned-down academic demeanor, reads like a similar bid for her generation’s approval. All of this is offset by her toadying to Alma, the old guard personified, with professional adulation lapsing into lust.
Alma flounders glamorously at the center of the proceedings, driven to pill-popping by a steadily worsening ulcer. As she’s doted upon by her happily henpecked house-husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) –– a psychologist who cooks her tarts and cassoulet, waiting patiently for scraps of physical intimacy –– Maggie’s allegations bring a long-buried assault scandal from Alma’s teenhood brimming to the surface. The script hurls every complication it can at these fundamentally simple characters, but when all is said and done, scorn is Garrett’s stock and trade.
Attempts to humanize her harried, hawkish antiheroine –– performed with tight-lipped conviction by a stunt-cast Roberts –– eventually diagnose Alma’s failure to support her student as a side effect of compartmentalized guilt. It’s revealed that her statutory rapist was driven to suicide, an adolescent trauma she bears with a sense of unfounded responsibility –– this potential source of empathy is twisted cynically by the film’s cryptic coda, in which, five years later, she has used this story to recover her public image and ascend to dean. Alma also, crucially, shares an erotic encounter with Hank in the final act that sours as the latter becomes increasingly aggressive. Though she has claimed to believe Maggie throughout the film, this is when Alma finally realizes the truth. She can only understand her student’s assault in relation to her own experiences of sexual violence. It’s a deliberately anticlimactic revelation that the film neither earns nor meaningfully comments upon.
After the Hunt seems to pride itself on vulgarity and cynicism, but it refuses to make those qualities remotely interesting, sidestepping its basic instincts with failed stabs at ambiguity. Guadagnino, admirably, doesn’t condescend to trash, but he also fails to sell it with conviction. This is especially galling when the film ends on a baffling fourth-wall break, with the director calling “cut” from outside the frame. Wading through a muck of empty symbols and italicized frissons, the only salient takeaway is a sense of disbelief that all of the A-listers in question would sign their names to such a vacuous project. This is fitting for a film about being let down by someone you hold in high regard.
DIRECTOR: Luca Guadagnino; CAST: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon MGM Studios; IN THEATERS: October 17; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 18 min.
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