After the Hunt (2025)
Director Luca Guadagnino's (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers) new film After the Hunt is an exploration of the aftermath of a Yale graduate student's accusation of sexual assault against a professor. In a way, it would make an interesting double feature with this year's Eddington. Both examine how people can use moral movements of the moment (#MeToo, COVID safety, George Floyd protests) to advance their own ambitions and agendas. Both are quite good at times, but both don't quite come together in the end.
Julia Roberts plays Alma, a philosophy
professor at Yale with a doting husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) who knows
he loves her more than she loves him. The morning after a party at Alma's home,
her star pupil Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) comes to her in tears accusing Alma's
colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault. Alma is conflicted;
something seems a little off about Maggie's story (Hank recently accused her of
plagiarism), but Hank is also the type of person who's a little too handsy and
a little too chummy with the students. There's also intimations of a prior
fling between Alma and Hank, as well as an incident from Alma's past that may
color her judgment.
Hank gets fired, but Maggie does not
seem to be done. She turns her sights on Alma for not being adequately
supportive and is not shy about approaching reporters to conduct a trial by
media. Activist students soon start crusading against Alma, too, who's slowly
unraveling, aided in part by crippling stomach pains and a need for
prescription medication to soothe them.
The movie admirably does not want to
provide the viewer with easy answers. Some critics have slammed the film for
not being sympathetic enough to Maggie, but the movie is pretty unsparing in
its assessments of all of its characters. It's true that Maggie and her cadre
of activists come off as annoying, privileged narcissists at times, but Hank
and Alma do not come off well, either. The film even takes pains to make it
clear that Hank may very well be guilty despite his furious denials. The point
of the film is not to take a firm stance one way or the other on #MeToo but to
show that no matter what ideals a person spouts, in the end, they will always
look out for themselves. It's a pretty withering look at the cutthroat nature
of academia.
Similar to Eddington, After
the Hunt runs into problems because it doesn't quite know how to wrap
things up. There's an excellent scene between Alma and Frederik near the end
(Stuhlbarg is a standout), but there's also an awkward epilogue that doesn't
work. The film runs 139 minutes, and the pacing sometimes lags (the script's
structure is kind of loose). Also, while Trent Reznor's musical work on Tron:
Ares absolutely enhanced the film, here, his score (with Atticus Ross) is
intrusive. Granted, it's clearly trying to be intentionally unsettling, but
there are times when it actively gets in the way of a scene.
After the Hunt is flawed, but at
least it tries to tackle sensitive subjects in a provocative manner. It's a
movie that, for better or worse, people are likely to remember years from now.
