After the Hunt Review: Luca Guadagnino Goes Hunting for Sacred Cows

Julia Roberts has almost exclusively trafficked in contemporary stories; her bawdy laugh and mischief-making eyes don’t really jibe with period garb. But her new role in After the Hunt – a self-consciously au courant piece whacking at the double hornet’s nests of campus politics and the #MeToo movement – had me blinking in surprise, and not a little bit of delight. Who woulda thunk she had a Hitchcock blonde in her?

Roberts’ Alma is on the icier side of platinum: An adjunct professor of philosophy at Yale, she seems broadly adored but gives very little of herself back in return. After the Hunt opens at a party held at the tastefully chic home she shares with her analyst husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) – a handy way for screenwriter Nora Garrett to assemble all the players and let the audience observe how they interact, what troubles and excites them. For instance: how queenly Alma looks in her immaculate cream suit, how fellow professor Hank (Andrew Garfield) manspreads on the couch, and how Alma’s protégé Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) is comfortable enough in their townhouse to know her way to the guest bathroom but appears, as a Black woman, to be a rarity among the attendees. 

In the drunken banter of professional eggheads, they all talk at each other and over each other and gesture at what one character calls academia’s “sudden subservience to inclusivity” – a blip in time that’s apparently already over now that DEI has been declared verboten. All in all, a superficially friendly gathering with a strong undercurrent of seething. 

These people have no boundaries, which director Luca Guadagnino blocks out in a masterful early scene, when everyone collects in the kitchen to say goodnight. It’s a pinball machine of eyebrow-raising behaviors: Alma gives Maggie an affectionate kiss on the cheek, then an ill-timed head swivel occasions an accidental mouth brush between Maggie and Frederik, while Hank kisses Alma full on the lips, pushing the limits of acceptable behavior between colleagues. Finally, when Alma pushes them out the door, she lingers at the peephole, watching Hank and Maggie – a professor and a student – exit the party together. Does it make a difference to know Hank doesn’t have tenure yet? Or that Maggie is in the graduate program? How about that Hank is considered a harmless flirt? Or that Maggie is a lesbian? Not to mention, Hank and Maggie both barely conceal their desire for Alma, a fact not lost on Alma. (“You tend to choose people because they worship you,” her husband correctly observes, and he would surely count himself among her devotees.)

The morning after the party, an accusation is made. Alma is called upon to choose sides. What follows is nominally a thriller – borne out in a couple amusing jump scares and suspenseful framing – but the filmmakers deny us a lead we can cozy up to like a Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant. Alma is too brittle for that. She’s got more in common with Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár: You wouldn’t want to be pals, but she’s absolute mesmerism. It’s one of Roberts’ best ever performances, not in least part because of how confidently she wears her age and Alma’s secrets, now that her ingénue years are firmly behind her. The woman with the mile-wide smile is no longer interested in courting our favor. 

Is After the Hunt one of Guadagnino’s best? It’s certainly better than his last film, the fever dream Queer; like Roberts, he’s playing it cool here. (But still, forever, the provocateur: Did he choose Woody Allen’s distinctive credits font just for the nyah-nyahs of it all?) Garfield, inescapably emo, is miscast as a working-class Lothario, while Edebiri is tasked less with a role than to be the human embodiment of everything that exhausts Gen X about Gen Z. There are more than a few moments that will ping your inner ok boomer automatic response system, although it’s notable that Guadagnino and Garrett seem to disdain all parties equally (save Stuhlbarg, a cherubic presence), in a way that feels a little immature for such serious subject matter. 

That, in the end, seems rather the point. Every sacred cow gets its neck slit here, and any conclusive answer to the he said/she said of it all takes a backseat to After the Hunt’s true ambition, which is to expose the overwhelming performativeness of this moment in time we’re in: the virtue signaling, the playing to (smartphone) camera, the public apologia required to return to the fold. Announcing Guadagnino’s own invisible hand in the film’s last frame is the tell. It’s all about as real as Alma’s hairshade… but no less fascinating for it.

This article appears in October 17 • 2025.