After the Hunt

Luca Guadagnino's latest complicates a rather simple topic

Sexual assault on American college campuses is a true epidemic. According to RAINN, 1 in 4 women university students are sexually assaulted in the US. It is a staggering figure that was brilliantly tackled in the documentary The Hunting Ground (2015). Following that documentary came the #MeToo movement, which led to some needed reforms in attitude and discipline of sexual assault attitudes. Yet much of this progress, remains mere posturing, statistics have not gone down for assaults on college campuses, and the “culture wars” have swung much of the reform momentum in the other direction. This is where Luca Guadagnino’s latest After the Hunt (2025) enters the conversation.

After the Hunt follows Yale University philosophy professor Alma (Julia Roberts). She is cozy with fellow professor Hank (Andrew Garfield) and one of her students Maggie (Ayo Edibiri), and lives in a passionless marriage with psychologist Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg). When Hank is accused of sexually assaulting Maggie, Alma is forced to confront her relationship with both, as well as a suppressed part of her past.

After the Hunt continues a rather prolific pace of films from Guadagnino; it is his third film in the last 12 months, following Queer (2024) and Challengers (2024). While both those films also dealt with the intersection of identity and sex, After the Hunt doesn’t quite nestle within the spiritual trilogy. Instead, following a script from Nora Garrett (her first writing credit), After the Hunt is more focused on bluntly discussing the merits and drawbacks of the post-MeToo world and the generational attitudes towards cancel culture and wokeness. Unfortunately, Garrett’s script fails in its initial attempt to present an objective both-sideism, and shows its cards as wanting to rant about a sheltered and snowflake Gen Z instead.

Garrett and Guadagnino have the intent of showing a complex and nuanced discussion, yet the way that the facts and the arguments in the film clash, makes the central incident of the film appear very straightforward. There was no point where I doubted Hank’s guilt or the veracity of his assault, and as such, the conflation of cancel culture as being too extreme in relation to an actual rape, is rather problematic. By trying to present this discussion as unnecessarily complicated, After the Hunt instead misses the actual nuances of the problems with cancel culture and wokeness.

It is a hot-button and almost toxic word nowadays, yet “woke” is now used to tarnish anything that conservative and far-right parties don’t like in blanket statements. Yet, it can be argued that woke-ism has never fully been put into motion, but rather appropriated as a cover by elite structures. This is the precise argument made in “We Have Never Been Woke: the Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite” by Musa Al-Gharbi, with wokeness having been used by corporations and powerful institutions like Yale, to pretend to be progressive, but never actually changing. Such is the argument made by Nikole Hannah-Jones in a recent interview on the New York Times podcast “The Daily,” regarding DEI, and how, far from it being “anti-white,” was actually a cover for elite institutions to hide their lack of actual progress. This dichotomy and complexity is the true dilemma at the center of wokeness, not the one presented in After the Hunt.

Garrett does seem to try and explore the causes of a generational divide towards their approaches to sexual assault, yet it is a storyline that is buried beneath the vitriol and rage that is directed towards the “lazy” and “entitled” Gen Z, so that the core point that After the Hunt should be about, is lost in the mix. It is a rather reductive way of presenting the argument, and falling into the same blanket assumptions and pitfalls that the film criticizes.

Guadagnino has had uneven films in the past, Queer had a brilliant first act, but unraveled as it went on, while To the Bone (2022) seemed more focused on spectacle than character; yet the craft and technical ability has always been evident. After the Hunt is technically marvelous to behold, with inventive cinematography, jarring and original editing choices, and unsettlingly effective blocking. One particular scene with an intense conversation between Alma and Maggie uses close-ups of their moving hands instead of focusing on their faces.

As with most of Guadagnino’s films, the performances are also stellar. Roberts is cast against type in an intriguing experiment; having her be a strung and passive character, suppressing all emotions desperately for fear of what may come rushing out. It is one of her darker performances since August Osage County (2013), yet errs on the side of being too cynical at tims. Garfield is scant yet winning as a fidgeting and flirty professor, and Edebiri is likewise sympathetic and vulnerable as the student victim. Yet it is Stuhlbarg who steals the show in on yet another Guadagnino film. The American actor is always relegated to second fiddle and background throughout his cinematic career, yet with Guadagnino he has delivered some of his more memorable scenes and cinematic moments, most notably the father speech in Call Me By Your Name (2017), and his terrifying fireside interaction in To the Bone. In After the Hunt, Stuhlbarg is ravishing in his every scene, showing the nuance, layers, and complexity that the film’s script is missing. His was the most interesting character on screen, and one who enlivened and crackled the screen every time he appeared.

In the end, After the Hunt is a disappointment from Guadagnino. Downed by a lackluster script, which is incapable of dealing with the topical subject in a nuanced manner, the film descends instead into frequent rants, burying its narrative and characters underneath a veneer of complexity for a rather straightforward moral dilemma. The technical ability from Guadagnino alongside his adeptness at extracting stellar performances from his game cast, does enough to carry you to the credits of an otherwise misguided and poorly framed cultural argument.  

5.7/10