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PORTSIDE CULTURE

#METOO CAMPUS THRILLER AFTER THE HUNT IS PROVOCATION FOR
PROVOCATION’S SAKE  
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Adrian Horton
October 21, 2025
The Guardian
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_ Julia Roberts emerges unscathed but Luca Guadagnino’s tiring and
muddled attempt to comment on trending topics doesn’t inspire the
debates it so clearly wants. _

Andrew Garfield and Julia Roberts in After the Hunt. , Photograph:
Amazon Content Services LLC/PA

 

In theory, After the Hunt
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director Luca Guadagnino’s would-be psychological thriller tracing
the fallout of a sexual-assault accusation at a cosseted Ivy League
campus, hinges on a single early scene: Alma, the aloof and alluring
philosophy professor made icily incandescent by Julia Roberts, arrives
home to find Maggie, her doctoral student protege played by ascendant
star Ayo Edebiri, waiting for her in the rain.

Crouched together in an apartment stairwell – Guadagnino, a slick
and stylish film-maker, frames them facing each other as mirrored
negatives in preppy neutrals, a generational yin-yang – Maggie tells
Alma in clipped, digressive bits that something bad happened with Hank
(Andrew Garfield), a fellow tenure-track professor who serves as
Alma’s professional rival, friend and maybe lover. The two had left
Alma’s the night before following an evening of drinking and tossing
around airless provocations about how offending someone became “the
pre-eminent cardinal sin”, or how “the common enemy has been
chosen and it’s the straight, white, cis male”. After a nightcap
at her apartment, Maggie says, Hank “crossed the line”.

This is the point where one would expect, based on the handful of
movies post-#MeToo
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have employed ellipsis to convey the stultifying horrors of sexual
assault, or the predominance of the so-called trauma plot
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contemporary narratives, or even just the fresh memory of a similar
scene of immediate aftermath in Eva Victor
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superb dramedy Sorry, Baby
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that Maggie would stumble around details of the violation, or the
numbing shock, or the confusing freefall of aftermath. But Edebiri, as
the critic Justin Chang observed
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seems to have been directed to play Maggie as if she’s lying –
wide-eyed, jittery, evasive and perhaps even, in overtly reaching for
Alma’s hand, manipulative. (We have already seen her rifle through
Alma’s bathroom and steal what amounts to Chekhov’s old newspaper
clippings.) This scene of revelation – the first telling of what
happened – plays not as a confession but a loyalty test for Alma,
one which the mentor, cold and clinical and dismissive, fails
miserably.

It’s seemingly also a false loyalty test for the viewer: do you
believe Maggie, because you feel like you should? Do you trust the
story? Watching this scene, I felt the dull tug of bait, the same
feeling I get when anyone mentions “cancel culture” seriously. My
hackles raised slightly at the presumption of certain presumptions:
that I would interpret a scene through a blind “believe all women”
lens, that I would critique a film for calling such slogans into
question, that I would, on some level, be offended. The point of this
scene, in this campus drama of generational divides and reputational
warfare, is not to illuminate a particular experience or action; it is
politicized reaction. As Alma’s philosophy department head puts it,
lamenting the increasingly fraught world of academia: “Against all
odds, I’ve found myself in the business of optics, not substance.”

That’s not necessarily a bad business for a film to be in,
particularly one about an allegation that so often hinges on the
perceived trustworthiness of the person who comes forward, how well
they can make their case to the court of public opinion. A better film
would have treated this scene as a grenade launched into Yale’s
philosophy department, examining the strange and discomfiting
complexities that emerge when inherently unverifiable testimony meets
arbitrary procedures, when personal loyalties challenge ethical
stances and when doubts collide with conviction – what the campus
reaction to sexual assault might have been like, during that brief
window between the upwelling of #MeToo and the now entrenched,
predominant backlash.

Instead, After the Hunt, written by first-time screenwriter Nora
Garrett and glossed up by Guadagnino into a recent-history period
piece (it’s primarily set in 2019, though its topical references
span the 2010s), treats it like a pinball, flinging Maggie’s
unspecified allegation off a series of hot-button third rails. What
if, as Hank claims, Maggie plagiarized her dissertation, and he was
about to expose her? What if, actually, she is the Black, queer spawn
of the b-word (billionaire, and Yale mega-donors at that; given that
Ivy League nepo babies are overwhelmingly white, this detail feels
particularly contrived to juice the idea that marginalized identity
confers unearned or undeserved privilege). What if a mob of
protesters, led by her non-binary partner, swarm Alma for answers?
What if she is actually a mediocre student?

After the Hunt trains not on Maggie, however, but on Alma, whom
Roberts imbues with a magnetic inscrutability that manages to give
shape to a ludicrous spiral through a cluster of provocations –
sexual assault allegation, Brett Kavanaugh-esque pleas for sympathy,
“cancel culture”, administrative dogma, gen-X derision for gen-Z
snow-flakiness. The film unfortunately echoes earlier movies shaped by
the #MeToo movement – Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman
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Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling
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Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice
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that prioritized deadening shock over character to make a point. In
those, it was some variation of “misogyny is a helluva drug”. In
After the Hunt, as the director and stars have reiterated in a
high-profile press tour, it’s to get people talking.

It’s not working – the film made a dismal $1.6m domestically on
its opening weekend. That’s a confluence of factors outside the
film’s control – it doesn’t help that it’s arriving as a relic
of the late-Biden era at a time when universities are under full
ideological assault from the Trump administration – but in part
because provocation for provocation’s sake is not a winsome trick.
After the Hunt, like all of Guadagnino’s films, is sleek and
intoxicating and attractive, in the way that mahogany-walled,
prestigious rooms can be; it’s also hollow, a cacophony of clanging
signifiers like Foucault’s panopticon, Rolling Stone exposés and
“this shallow cultural moment”. Spoilers ahead: it’s never made
clear what actually happened between Hank and Maggie, nor what Maggie
even accuses him of, as if it makes no difference; Hank is revealed to
be right about Maggie’s plagiarism but also liable to not stop at
“no”; weakened by illness, Alma confesses to her husband, Frederik
(Michael Stuhlbarg), that she had a relationship as a 15-year-old with
her father’s friend, then made up rape allegations to punish him
when his interest strayed. That she was a child, as Frederik argues,
feels like poor consolation; the emphasis remains on the damage of
improperly weaponized feelings, everyone revealed to be horribly
compromised.

I don’t believe, as some have argued
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that this amounts to “reactionary centrism”, a mode of politics
that prioritizes even-handedness while over-indexing leftwing
overreach. To call it such would be to ascribe too much ideological
logic to a film that is primarily about the feeling of agitation via
micro-era buzzwords. Nor is it a crime of “muddled politics” –
films reflect people, and people are always a jumble of
contradictions, idiosyncrasies, patterns and histories that are never
entirely coherent. It reads, instead, as an honest reflection of
“cancel culture” – a misnomer of a concept that is always
inflated, never honestly invoked, at once too broad and too
inflexible: a largely ungrounded concept whose meaning depends on the
user, often as a deflection. Like so much of the online discourse
cycles that clearly inspired the film’s twists, After the Hunt has
the stale taste of something reverse-engineered to push buttons,
inorganic controversy manufactured to pass as juicy. (See, in the
rage-bait variety, the recent Sydney Sweeney jeans controversy
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To be fair, it is exceedingly difficult to translate internet frenzy
to the big screen – Todd Field’s magnificent Tár
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also about a domineering, icy, staggeringly compromised woman, was one
of the very few to seamlessly weave a strain of “cancel culture”
in, by burrowing deeply into the psyche of said staggeringly
compromised woman. After the Hunt, despite Roberts’ stellar
performance, settles, like many “cancel culture” wielders, for the
self-satisfied facsimile of argument. For a film billed as “not
everything is supposed to make you comfortable”, it seems all too
pleased.

* after the hunt
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* Cancel culture
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* #Me Too movement
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* academia
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* Luca Guadagnino
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