Watching Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt, a movie about a purported sexual assault in a high-stakes academic arena, put me in mind of David Mamet's Oleanna, a 1994 movie that dealt with betrayal and accusations between a student and teacher in a college setting. Oleanna was delivered with sharp elbows. After the Hunt deals with similar issues but plays in a less insistent register.
Mamet took aim at the staunch MeToo inflexibility. Guadagnino tries a more tempered approach, leaving key questions unanswered and focusing on the way an incident of abuse plays out at Yale in 2019.
Working from a screenplay by Nora Garrett, Guadagnino begins his movie with a dark screen and what sounds like the ticking of a clock, perhaps to suggest that the characters we'll meet are about to undergo a severe test.
Rather than turning his movie into a MeToo screed or a rant against cancel culture excesses, Guadagnino focuses on how the ambitions of his characters become enmeshed in circumstances over which they steadily lose control.
After the Hunt centers its story on a Yale philosophy professor (Julia Roberts) who's on the verge of receiving tenure, the gold ring on the academic carousel. Roberts' Alma has a flirtatious buddy relationship with another professor (Andrew Garfield) who's also seeking tenure in the philosophy department.
Alma's psychiatrist husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) seems like a vestige from a relationship that formed when Alma was immature enough to idolize him. The glow has worn off, but the relationship staggers on.
Ayo Edebiri plays Maggie, the movie's most problematic character, a gay graduate student who sets off a campus firestorm when she accuses Garfield's Hank of crossing a sexual line.
Is the ambitious Maggie -- who is suspected of having plagiarized her doctoral thesis -- telling the truth? Having pegged Maggie as a rising star, will Alma continue to support her or give her friend the benefit of the doubt? Do donations made by Maggie's wealthy family prevent the truth from being uncovered? And why did Alma single out Maggie for special attention in the first place?
Roberts conveys flinty credibility as a scholar who has mastered academic speak while struggling with inner torment. Alma occasionally doubles over with stomach pain. She harbors a secret that, as the movie progresses, becomes easier to guess.
Garfield does what might be his best work yet as a gregarious scholar whose affability could conceal predatory behavior, and Stuhlbarg ably plays a man who, when feeling pressed, expresses his anger in childish ways.
Chloe Sevigny offers additional support as an academic who serves a guidance role with students and faculty alike, smoothing ruffled feathers and providing mental health counseling.
Some of Guadagnino's scenes bristle with tension, and it's a pleasure to watch Roberts sink her teeth into a role. In one of the movie's strongest scenes, she eviscerates Maggie for being a spoiled child of privilege. In another memorable moment, she skewers one of her students deeply enough to scar the kid for life.
It’s possible, though, that the movie overdoes things. Maggie, for example, is Black, gay, and super-privileged, a loaded deck of traits that supposedly grants her immunity in a DEI-dominated world.
Some of Guadagnino's choices seem like self-conscious strains to establish the film's intellectual bona fides. Ambiguities about the nature of truth might have been clear without references to the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's arty score can be both intriguing and jarring.
Beyond all that, sexual abuse and cancel culture aren't exactly the freshest of subjects.
Still, I got caught up in the way Guadagnino and his cast create the insular bubble in which academic power games are played. The movie's pleasures derive from the ways in which Guadagnino finds the blood and bile that boil beneath a surface of academic refinement. I may be pushing the point, but After the Hunt sometimes felt as if a high-class helping of pulp somehow had gotten into Yale.
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