Desire is the lifeblood that runs through Luca Guadagnino’s filmography. Usually this takes the form of carnal or romantic need – though through Bones and All, Challengers and Queer he explored cannibalism, sporting greatness and addiction. In After the Hunt, from a script written by Nora Garrett, it’s the pursuit of power that initially seems to motivate the shrewd philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts, welcome back!) as she vies for a tenure position at Yale University. Her potential competition is her close friend and colleague Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), a rakish manchild who still smokes indoors and never quite buttons his shirt correctly. But Alma’s gently withering husband Frederick, a psychoanalyst, wonders if Alma and Hank have considered what they’ll do if they manage to land the prize they’ve been chasing all their professional lives. Perhaps it’s the chase rather than the spoils that thrill them.
At any rate, a revelation from grad student Maggie Price (Ayo Edibiri) throws a spanner in the works. The morning after a lively dinner party at Alma and Frederick’s achingly chic New Haven apartment, she turns up shivering and soaked on Alma’s doorstep. She confides in Alma that Hank sexually assaulted her following the party, and is disturbed when her professor reacts with apparent suspicion rather than sympathy. In turn, Hank pleads his innocence, claiming he caught Maggie cheating and this is her attempt to get even. One might expect the tension in After the Hunt to revolve around Alma’s uncertainty regarding who’s telling the truth, but this is less important to her than the potential threat to her career that her unwilling involvement creates.
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The ‘He said, she said’ dynamic in Hollywood’s output has exploded since the 2017 MeToo movement with varying results, but just as Alma’s interests lie elsewhere, so do Guadagnino’s. It’s not a question of how reliable or perfect a victim Maggie is (Alma states early on that she believes Maggie, and context clues about Hank speak to his behaviour) but rather how this event causes Alma’s carefully curated life to unravel as she’s forced to confront a secret from her own past as well as the nature of her relationships with both a colleague and a mentee.
While After the Hunt does dabble in interrogating the “cancel culture” rhetoric which feels inextricably linked to sexual assault allegations in contemporary society, it’s largely in the sense that Alma and Maggie’s ideas around justice seem incompatible. The generational, class and racial divides between the two effectively form a gulf of disagreements, with the common bond of womanhood alone not enough to provide safety. Yet there’s no obvious villain in either Alma or Maggie; Alma attempts to dissuade Maggie from pressing charges against Hank less out of fealty to him and more because she knows that this could mean Maggie is defined by her victimhood. On the other hand, Maggie views Alma’s attempts to dissuade her as a heartless cover-up to protect herself, Hank and the university rather than the actual victim.
The complexity of Alma as a character is pure Guadagnino, a natural fit into a cinematic body of work defined by the prospect of voracious hunger, and offers Roberts her best role since 2004’s Closer. She’s icy and impervious – the sort of glamorous college professor that makes students sit up straighter in class – and Roberts, regal and just a little wretched, has something to sink her teeth into. She’s complimented by Guadagnino returning player Michael Stuhlbarg, charming as the lightly eccentric, long-suffering husband who loves Alma unconditionally despite her flaws. Garfield is perhaps a little young for his part, but playing against type as a dislikable but all-too-recognisable cad. Despite her extremely charming off-screen presence and luminosity, Edibiri also seems a little miscast; she’s not quite able to hold her own against Roberts and there’s a self-conscious streak to her performance that veers distracting.
As ever Guadagnino delights in exploring the ways in which people crave more, more, more, and After the Hunt is salient regarding the gulf between generations of feminists, such as the amount of misogyny one should be expected to put up with on a day-to-day basis and what exactly a power imbalance looks like. If there is one major quibble, it’s that the script doesn’t quite trust its audience enough to end on a moving scene between Roberts and Stuhlbarg that also happens to be the most beautifully composed in the film, instead opting for an unnecessary over-explanatory coda. But the smart, keenly observed and undoubtedly thorny power play of After the Hunt make it an arresting psychodrama, confronting our willingness to swallow our own suffering in the name of self-preservation as well as what we owe to ourselves and each other in an imperfect, cheerfully cutthroat society.
