Starring: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield
Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Rated: R
Running Time: 139 minutes
Amazon MGM Studios
Our Score: 1.5 out of 5 Stars
The last time I saw Julia Roberts on screen was “Ben is Back.” She’s still got it. The last time I saw a Luca Guadagnino film was last year’s “Challengers” and “Queer.” He’s still got it too. But despite those strengths, the two powerhouses find themselves stuck in the middle of a true mess with “After the Hunt.”
Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, an esteemed philosophy professor at Yale, whose world begins to unravel when one of her star students, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), accuses Henrik Gibson (Andrew Garfield), a younger colleague of Alma’s, of sexual misconduct. Early on, we see that Maggie idolizes Alma; and the feeling appears mutual. That’s what makes Alma’s response so jarringly cold and standoffish. Instead of leaning in, she recoils.
The film sets itself up to tackle complex and timely themes like power, mentorship, and the #MeToo movement. But what follows is a series of disconnected moments and odd tonal choices. Character motivations feel vague or inconsistent. Dialogue is shallow. The entire production feels like no one, from director to composer, knew what kind of movie they were making.
Guadagnino’s direction is technically competent, but frequently puzzling. He lingers on characters without telling us why. He cuts to close-ups of hands fidgeting or flipping through pages as if trying to signal meaning, yet those moments never build toward any visual motif or narrative depth.
The cast is difficult to fault, given how erratically their characters are written. Take Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg), Alma’s husband. Most of the time, he’s calm and supportive. But during a crucial dinner scene between Alma and Maggie, he suddenly transforms into an immature, attention-seeking pecker. He gets the feeling that he needs to excuse himself. Instead of confirming this suspicious, he externalizes his dissatisfaction, and blasts classical music in another room. But he’s not done. He mopes theatrically in and out of the dinner scene like a ghost. It’s not a scene that deepens the drama; it derails it.
And then there’s the score. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have delivered award-winning soundtracks before, but here their music feels confused and abrasive. It implies tension that never materializes or crashes into scenes with jarring intensity, like a kid slamming piano keys out of frustration. It’s the perfect metaphor for the film itself, noise without purpose.
Most frustrating is the absence of any resolution or thematic payoff. I kept waiting for the “ah-ha” moment, something that would recontextualize the chaos or clarify the muddled tone. But it never comes. Instead, the film ends with the same smug superficiality that defines its characters. “After the Hunt” wants to say something profound about power, privilege, and institutional silence, but it never earns its place in that conversation. It feels like a thesis paper written the hour before it’s due.