Luca Guadagnino’s new MeToo-era drama After the Hunt begins with a credit sequence that meticulously recreates those that have adorned Woody Allen’s movies for the past 50 years: the names appear in a slender Windsor typeface on black. Guadagnino goes so far as to list the cast in alphabetical order, as is Allen’s wont, along with the very Allen-like use of a jazz standard, “A Child Is Born,” performed by Tony Bennett and Bill Evans.
This seems unlikely to be anything as simple as an homage to Allen.
On the other hand, it seems that it could not possibly be, at this late and post-woke date, an unreconstructed indictment of Allen in the manner of Frankie Shaw’s use of an Allen-style credit sequence in her long-forgotten but once much-talked-about series SMILF. Is Guadagnino setting the stage for an honest reckoning with MeToo, the excesses of which were ruinous to Allen’s reputation, or is he undertaking some sort of cheeky parody? That two of the movie’s stars, Julia Roberts and Chloe Sevigny, are veterans of Allen films adds to the possibilities.
In the end, and very much in the spirit of the academic world in which this movie marinates, most viewers will be tempted to check the box “none of the above.” After nearly two-and-a-half increasingly wearisome hours, After the Hunt refuses to state a case — any case. The film deposits the audience in Yale University, an unholy cauldron of professional striving, academic obfuscation, and sexual politics. But despite the rich stew, the film is curiously milquetoast. Guadagnino certainly evades the self-righteous glibness of peak MeToo productions such as She Said or Promising Young Woman, but he cannot bring himself to make a thoroughgoing statement against the movement’s worst features. Perhaps Guadagnino’s restraint is a welcome nod to the inevitable complexity and ambiguity of human affairs, but there is something deeply and weakly cautious about his neutral pose.
Roberts stars as Alma Imhoff, a philosophy professor at Yale who is said to be desperately anticipating tenure but whose life, well-manicured and well-appointed even without a forever job, seems to want for nothing. Early in the movie, Alma effortlessly oversees a kind of soiree for assorted faculty and students. In radiant dim light, she sinks into a luxurious sofa with a fellow tenure-seeking professor, the supercilious Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), and parries with her irksome psychiatrist husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), and her humorless, pain-in-the-neck PhD candidate student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). It is very difficult to discern Guadagnino’s take on these people, each insufferable in their own way: Are we meant to be impressed or annoyed by their easy (and rather dated) namechecks of Nietzsche and Foucault? In any case, Guadagnino accepts wholesale the opulence of Alma’s existence: He films her house, her furnishings, the hallowed grounds on which she walks with far more awe than the more impishly sarcastic Allen ever would. At the end of the party, she does not flinch at doling out several hundred dollars to “the help,” though she visibly winces when overcome by a vaguely defined gastrointestinal condition that causes her to gag into the commode at various points, a harbinger of the miseries to come.
The trouble begins the next day, when Maggie asserts to Alma that Hank, in whose company she left Alma’s party, prevailed upon her to serve him a nightcap at her apartment and proceeded to sexually assault her. To her credit, Alma insists that Maggie fill in the details to which she only vaguely refers. “What are you saying he did?” Alma practically shouts at Maggie. But because Guadagnino declines to depict the episode in question, we are left with Maggie’s accusations, insinuations, and evasions, and Hank’s increasingly temper-tantrum-like denials. (Garfield seems to have studied Matt Damon’s performance as Brett Kavanaugh on Saturday Night Live.) Sitting at a diner with a reluctant-to-get-involved Alma during which he improbably seems to order half the menu, Hank concedes that he wormed his way into Maggie’s apartment, and that he perceived her as coming onto him, but insists he did nothing except accuse her of committing plagiarism — the reason, he reckons, for what he presents as her spurious charge.
The choice to leave the Maggie-Hank encounter off-screen may reflect reality. We can usually never know with certainty what has happened in any case where a grave crime is asserted. But a movie is not real life. For this story to have meaning, we must know what the story is: Was Maggie assaulted? Is Hank telling the truth? To evade the matter, as Guadagnino does, allows him to waver. At times, Maggie seems credibly wounded and sympathetic. And Hank seems defensive and self-justifying. (Of course, Guadagnino and screenwriter Nora Garrett have weighted the film this way.) At other times, Maggie appears to hedge — for example, telling Alma that, though there is no physical evidence for the alleged crime, there is video of her walking up to a campus clinic in its aftermath. When Hank, fired seemingly without due process, tells Alma, “You know the truth and you won’t say it because you’re afraid it will make you look bad,” we want to nod. But should we? We are left to puzzle.
If the point of After the Hunt is neither to validate Maggie nor vindicate Hank, what, exactly, is the point? For long stretches, Guadagnino seems to be toying with the idea of a full-scale takedown of the woke contagion, something that would be a genuinely impressive achievement. Surely Guadagnino is being satirical when he sets a scene at a Yale-sponsored event on the topic “The Future of Jihadism is Female” or when he has Frederik whip up breakfast to the noxious music of composer John Adams. Then again, is he? Adams’s music was the marrow of Guadagnino’s earlier film, and his first notable success, I Am Love (2009).
After being given the heave-ho from Yale, Hank disappears from the movie for long stretches. But the more time Alma spends in the company of Maggie, the less sure she is of her motives or her sense of her own irreproachableness. We can perceive Alma’s inner eye roll when Maggie talks about the topic of her dissertation (“virtue ethics”), and we can hear Alma’s frustration when Maggie starts to entertain giving her story to the Yale Daily News, which she proceeds to do. The movie almost becomes the movie we want it to be when Alma, having reached a breaking point, admonishes Maggie’s “non-binary” partner Alex (Lio Mehiel), who uses “they/them” pronouns, to butt out: “They, go away!” Alma screams. Let us give credit where it’s due: It takes courage for the star of Pretty Woman and Erin Brockovich to read a line like that. Earlier, Alma excoriates her clueless students (who seem to assemble in groups of three or five for long philosophical discussions with Madame Professor) for their trigger warnings and self-protective instincts.
This is all well and good, but because the film is so rambling and inconclusive, these gestures represent table scraps for half the country. It’s not unlike Jennifer Lawrence teasing (but not too harshly) the young and the woke in her 2023 comedy No Hard Feelings. In the case of After the Hunt, it is virtually impossible to exit the film with any concrete takeaway at all. When Maggie surreptitiously finds evidence that Alma herself was the victim of an assault in her youth, are we to applaud Maggie for bringing to light Alma’s hypocrisy, or feel for Alma for having her private life torn asunder? What are we to make of Alma purloining a prescription pad from her psychiatrist friend (an inexplicably homely Sevigny) to get access to medication?
‘THE MORNING SHOW’ OUTGROWS ITS SUBJECT
We can be pretty sure that Guadagnino has had his fill of Maggie by the time she says lines like, “I don’t feel comfortable in this conversation with you anymore,” and that he is mocking the cardboard-sign-wielding losers who harangue Alma for her supposed nonsupport of Maggie. But what of Hank? Is he predator or victim? What of Alma? Is she coward or heroine? To leave these matters unanswered is not sophistication but timidity.
After the Hunt is one-third of a film that meaningfully engages with the age, but no true satirist would settle for a participation trophy.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.