The first time Julia Roberts unleashes her megawatt smile in After the Hunt, it’s ironically delivered through a cathartic inter-generational clash. In the scene, Roberts’ character, Professor Alma Olsson, is finally letting loose, ravaging a PhD student for their overly sentimentalized interpretation of the word “Other.” As Alma’s tightly-screwed image of academic aloofness unravels, blood pumps riotously into the film, animating so many of its core questions from whispered conversation to full frontal confrontation.
Sadly, this cinematic heat is missing for most of the sedated film. Following the guise of a “he said, she said,” “me too” narrative from within the Ivory Tower (Yale’s garret specifically), the film is more interested in pointing towards a range of questions around identity and power than dissecting them. Roberts’ Alma is asked to choose between her close comrade Professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) and her protégé pupil Maggie Price (Ayo Edebiri) after Maggie accuses Hank of sexual assault. Is Alma the type to believe the charismatic, hot-tempered Hank with all his bombastic displays of masculinity and overt seediness? Or will she lean towards the sorrowful narrative offered by billionaire adoptee Maggie, a student whose respect for Alma bleeds from admiration to idolatry? While Alma is forced to examine her loyalties, the filmmakers remain obstinately ambiguous in circling their thorny subjects — pushing audiences to implicate themselves in their own interpretations of the off-screen events.
This is a surprisingly puritan ethos to emerge from Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who is most beloved for his vivid and sumptuous displays of longing and carnal appetite. Within a body of work that aches with tactility, Guadagnino’s After the Hunt is unnervingly disconnected. The bloodless world of Roberts’ Alma is cloaked in shadows and shades of gray, externalizing her suppression of a childhood secret. This caginess echoes into the film like a death knell, squashing any hope of electricity or narrative propulsion. Roberts’ studied performance is effective but bleak in its over-refinement, forcing the audience into a distant remove. How to feel, then, when her great secret is finally “revealed”? Sadly the viewer is left unimpacted, untouched, and unaffected.
There are key moments, however, where the film breaks out of its dreary self-hypnosis. The always exceptional Michael Stuhlbarg breathes life into the role of Alma’s psychologist husband Frederik, a domestic doormat for Alma’s perfectly unscuffed Oxfords. Always baking a glorious-looking cassoulet or waking Alma gently with a loving touch (her very own humanized-alarm-clock), Frederik’s repeated warnings about his wife’s slippery relationships with Hank and Maggie are willfully ignored. The film’s most delicious scene occurs when Alma invites Maggie over to the house to discuss Hank’s assault. As Maggie and Alma conspire in the kitchen, Frederik’s frustrations finally boil over. He blasts music from the next room, consistently reentering the women’s space through a swinging door. Each entrance becomes a musical attack, filling the room with his literal and aural presence. An act of flamboyant passive aggression, Frederik revels in this fleeting yet meaningful seizure of power – gracefully offering more insight into the machinations of their marriage than prior dialogue could muster.
Surprisingly, Alma, Hank and Maggie all work in the university’s philosophy department — not an intellectual space known for its sedateness. French philosopher Michel Foucault is invoked throughout the film, with characters noting his preoccupation with the cadences of power across all boundaries. As someone writing from a college campus, I was struck by the film’s decision to reference Foucault (a man who wrote loudly and gleefully about sex and sexuality) without scrutinizing those power imbalances with more granularity. After the Hunt is afraid of such viscousness, lacking the moral clarity its characters so avidly seek. This choice warps the collegiate setting into an artificial blank space, using the world for its expositional displays of power (and iconic references à la Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) without interrogating how that power manifests in its characters’ interior lives.
Although this film comes from one of the directors I adore, in a setting I intimately understand, with topics that are prescient, relevant and necessary, it left me dissatisfied. I am curious why Guadagnino leaned into the sterile — a space he rarely occupies — and wonder what a different director may have done with the same material. As is, I could not help but feel the Italian director was reluctant to get too familiar with his overtly American subject (even going so far as to depict the actors out-of-focus when in close up). Moreover, the film brings up deep-seated questions of an inter-generational divide without appealing to either generation — instead throwing each under the bus without a sense of purpose. The Gen Zs are clownish and overly sensitive, the Gen Xs clueless and self-involved. Who, then, will lead us forward? In a journey that is judiciously nuanced, the film’s end result is overly edited, self-referential, and ultimately shortsighted.
As the Dean of Humanities admits to Alma behind closed doors, academia is now in the “business of optics rather than substance” — a depressingly fitting description for the whole endeavor.