“Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable.”
I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that the first trailer for After the Hunt evoked a great deal of instant anxiety due to the numerous hot-button themes it promised to tackle. The latest from Luca Guadagnino, the film was poised to be an unflinching, uncompromising deep dive into the world we live in now, an exploration into the current landscape, complete with its generational divides and reframed perspectives on class and race, examined through a variety of vantage points. It’s fair to say that Guadagnino does touch on all of the above, and that his cast do wholeheartedly throw themselves into the sensitive territory he is so eager to immerse himself in. But with its puzzling perspectives, shaky characterizations, and a habit of saying way too much without actually having said anything at all, it’s safe to say that the anxiety ends with the trailer.
In After the Hunt, Julia Roberts plays Alma, a philosophy professor at Yale with her sights set on tenure. Married to psychologist Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg), life is seemingly going Alma’s way until her prized pupil, PhD candidate Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), comes to her claiming she’s been sexually assaulted by associate professor Hank (Andrew Garfield). Not sure of what to do, and with Hank denying anything happened, Alma finds her own life eventually starting to unravel.
Unsurprisingly, After the Hunt has some great technical elements working in its favor. The film’s look from cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, and the incredible score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, both work to give the film a truly haunted quality. The fact that After the Hunt was shot on 35mm also gives a sublime vintage feel that works as a great contrast to this story that’s so totally about today. Unfortunately, the film’s take on many of the aforementioned issues feels shallow and never goes beyond the surface in its attempt to understand the times. Far too many scenes come across like Nora Garrett’s script is just going through a checklist of social bullet points and forcing them into a narrative that aims to be current, but feels half-baked at best. Thematically, After the Hunt seems to think that stating the issue is the same as investigating it. The fact that major developments happen off-screen doesn’t help much, nor does the fact that two of the film’s key figures, Maggie and Hank, are given no flesh as characters, but are written, rather, as walking op-eds whose sole functions in the film seem to be to test Alma’s reaction to the events unfolding.
For reasons that sort of make sense, although not really, After the Hunt drops a lot of the interest it once had in Maggie and Hank (who appear in the film less and less as it goes on) and decides to become Alma’s story. This is a bit on the ironic side, given that, despite being the film’s lead, in many ways she’s also its most inconsequential character. But since we’re forced to follow her, we may as well make the best of it. The character’s “keep me out of this” attitude may seem cagey at first, but it does serve to turn her into a worthwhile protagonist whose journey does speak to the older generation’s fear regarding the current times. Questions such as: How far can one venture? Where is the line now? Is this too personal? Am I part of the problem, myself? All of these and more contribute to the maddening sense of dread within Alma as these thoughts, not to mention the darkness of her own past, start to consume her. After the Hunt is unquestionably hindered by not spending more time with the two key figures involved in this event, but by charting Alma’s own fear-fueled journey, the film at least gives us something visceral to latch onto.
Giving a performance that’s so quietly manic and full of a dizzying desperation, Roberts is nothing short of captivating. The scene where Alma feels she has no choice but to confront the past she’s tried so hard to push away allows Roberts to be at her most devastatingly vulnerable. It’s a shame the same opportunities weren’t extended to the rest of the cast. Stuhlbarg, as always, is a welcome presence, but Garfield and Edebiri are so hampered by the flatness of their roles that they have little else to do other than try to make their next scenes feel somewhat different from their last. Elsewhere, Chloe Sevigny, as the university psychologist, hangs around the periphery of the film only long enough to remind you she’s meant to be an actual part of it.
I read somewhere that Doubt writer/director John Patrick Shanley never revealed the truth about the accusations leveled at that film’s priest character, played superbly by Philip Seymour Hoffman. It was a plot point never revealed in the film, and a detail he decided to keep from the rest of the cast, which included Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis. The director only revealed the truth about whether or not the character committed the heinous act he is accused of in the film to the actor playing him. This made for an interesting dynamic between the cast and resulted in an incredibly electrifying cinematic experience that had the audience wondering and questioning what was true the entire time. Watching After the Hunt, I can’t help wondering if Guadagnino employed similar tactics, revealing to Edebiri and Garfield the truth about what really happened between the two characters. If he did, it certainly doesn’t show. What’s worse, by the film’s end, it’s tough to even care.
