My Review of After The Hunt (2025)

 

Written by Nora Garrett

Directed by Luca Guadagnino

Maggie: "I don't feel comfortable having this conversation with you anymore."

Alma: "Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable, Maggie. Not everything is supposed to be a lukewarm bath for you to sink into until you fall asleep and drown."

Taking a mild breather from horror stuff, I thought I'd venture into at least one potential award contender this week. Except this might already be out of the running. Luca Guadagnino, what is happening with you?

With Queer (2024) getting frozen out, there was potential for After The Hunt to be an award vehicle for Julia Roberts but in spite of her best efforts, this film sadly might be a lost cause. There's a good idea but it's so horribly muddled with the results on offer here.

You've got five characters. First there's Julia Roberts as philosophy professor, Alma Imhoff. She's in a crappy marriage to Frederik (Michael Stulbarg) and she's caught in a "he said, she said" dilemma between colleague Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) and promising student, Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri).

Maggie claimed that Hank sexually assaulted her and Hank claimed that she plagiarized an assignment and was accusing him of rape in revenge. While Hank turned out to be right about the latter, it's somewhat muddled as to whether or not he actually raped Maggie.

Alma's the one caught in the middle of the two as her dynamics with both Maggie and Hank are on display. At one point, Alma absolutely tore into Maggie's character and got slapped by her. A lot of what Alma said about Maggie did seem to be true even if it bordered on cruelty with the way she said it.

Then there was her marriage to Frederik. The latter was mostly a dick to her but did step during the times in which Alma's health took a turn for the worst. Alma's dynamic with Hank had all the toxic unresolved sexual tension that culminated in a moment that definitely made me think Hank might have been guilty of attacking Maggie after all.

There's a supporting role for Chloe Sevigny as university liaison, Dr Kim Sayers. Her character's very unprofessional and outright unhelpful and to be honest, I think Alma had every right to snap at her. Kim's not even the worst behaved character in this movie but she's also someone you wouldn't want to go to for advice.

- Maggie was established to be a lesbian and was dating Alex (Lio Mehiel). By the end of the movie, Maggie was dating an older woman when her and Alma cleared the air with each other.

- Luca Guadagnino and Andrew Garfield are currently working on Artificial and hopefully it'll be a better fit with the pair.

- I'm pretty sure this movie implied that despite Hank's obsession with Alma, he was also sleeping with Frederik and both female and male students. Hank got a job working for a Democrat.

- Chronology: Present day American setting, though it was filmed in London and Cambridge.

After The Hunt needed to be a good thirty minutes shorter and a lot more concise in its messaging. It does drag as a movie and despite it's leading cast, none of them are enough to raise this movie out of the mess it fell into.

Rating: 6 out of 10