Since the premiere screening of After the Hunt at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival, there have been murmurings among the commentariat that the film signals a pushback – both in Hollywood and society more generally – against #MeToo and cancel culture. Some have seen this as a reason to condemn the film; others argue that it is a necessary corrective against a movement that, with its unyielding ‘Believe Women’ mantra, has damaged the reputations of falsely accused men. That we tend to position ourselves on one side of this debate or the other suggests we need more films like After the Hunt: films that force us to consider the complex entanglement of emotions, intentions, and desires that obscures the truth – or otherwise – of accusations of sexual assault; that demand we ask how we have turned institutions once devoted to the robust testing of ideas into places willing to shut down discourse deemed ‘unsafe’ because it challenges someone’s beliefs or, as they would have it, their ‘truth’.

Directed by Italian director Luca Guadagnino – who has shown himself capable of fashioning films that are everything from hauntingly poetic (Call Me by Your Name [2017]; Bones and All [2022]) to straight-up ludicrous (Challengers [2024]) – After the Hunt largely takes place in the rarified air of Yale University’s philosophy department. Alma Olsson (a beguiling Julia Roberts) is the sort of charismatic, intellectually perky academic that really only exists in movies. An opening montage – accompanied by an ominous ticking – shows her sitting cross-legged on her desk in front of an attentive class; striding across campus as though she owns it; her husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg playing – and playing well – an extension of his role in Call Me by Your Name) waking her and setting down her daily pills.

Despite her senior position in the department, Alma feels the imperative to ‘publish or perish’. There is a paper she is trying to finish. There is a tenured position opening up in the department and she wants it. At a supper party she hosts for colleagues and students, she argues that current DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to promote women still have a long way to go before the decades – even centuries – of white male privilege are redressed.

Hank, Alma’s junior colleague and best friend (really a ‘lover without benefits’), is similarly interested in the tenure position. Played by a peppy Andrew Garfield, Hank shifts and twitches as though he has some inner – and deeply irritating – itch. At the party, he lavishes praise on both Alma and Maggie (a steadfast Ayo Edebiri), Alma’s graduate student. There are intimations of Maggie’s brilliance from both Alma and Hank and, when a drunk Hank offers to walk Maggie home, Alma watches from the peephole in her door as they stumble towards the apartment lift.

Ayo Edibiri as Maggie in After the Hunt (courtesy of Imagine Entertainment)

Alma’s expression as she watches Hank and Maggie is enigmatic. It has been enigmatic all evening – as has the facial expression of Frederik (a psychoanalyst), with whom Alma has shared condescending eyebrow-raises as they listen to the back-and-forth of philosophical banter. Enigmatic, one begins to think, is the predominant directorial note Guadagnino has given his actors: ‘How should I play this scene, Luca? Play it enigmatically. Play the ambiguity.’ But there is a difference between keeping the audience guessing and making the characters’ emotions and intentions so ambivalent that the film unfolds not as an ethical conflict but, rather, a moral smudge.

When Maggie accuses Hank of sexual assault, Alma’s dilemma is: to whom does she owe allegiance? Hank, who insists it is all a lie designed to deflect from a charge of plagiarism he was about to level at Maggie; or Maggie, who has repeatedly demonstrated how much she admires, trusts, even adores (according to Frederik) Alma and her work? That Maggie’s family are significant donors to Yale further complicates Alma’s position.

While the film doesn’t directly resolve who is telling the truth about the sexual assault – it implies there is honesty and dishonesty on all sides of the affray – it does give a strong suggestion of where the guilt, for the assault itself at least, lies. But guilt or otherwise is really a side issue to Alma’s fall (this is why, perhaps, the film is called After the Hunt, not The Hunt), a descent that might have emerged as a potent tragedy if it had it been situated within a more astute and focused script (this is actor Nora Garrett’s first screenplay).

There is in Roberts’s performance a turbulent undercurrent, one that betrays the fatal flaws precipitating Alma’s fall: her intellectual hubris, her tendency towards highbrow bullying when challenged, and her lack of fidelity to anyone but herself. But what in the end makes Alma’s tragedy so limp is that the script is an untidy mess of undeveloped philosophical theory, pointless misdirection (a secret in Alma’s past; the debilitating physical pain Alma suffers; a stolen prescription pad) and the sort of plotting (particularly in the warped mirroring of Alma and Maggie) that would sit better in a slasher-horror film (something about this film kept reminding me of Single White Female [1992]). It is certainly not a plot that can support Guadagnino’s overly ponderous directorial inflections: the textures he creates through lingering close-ups on characters’ hands, for example; the Hitchcockian score (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross); or the shifts in visual perspective that position us sometimes as viewers of the action and sometimes as participants – both accusers and accused – within it.

Singularly curious among Guadagnino’s directorial decisions are his clear allusions to the work of Woody Allen. The opening credits duplicate Allen’s signature white font on black background style (a style Allen hit on when he discovered how much of his famously modest budgets were being spent on opening title sequences), as does the music which accompanies them. The intellectual hum of Alma’s party, the lavish buffet, the hired help in the kitchen all echo Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). The playing out of a moral dilemma within a context that foregrounds both human desire and philosophical discourse reflects Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989). The brilliant and ostensibly devoted student who uses their egotistical teacher as a stepping stone for their own advancement is reminiscent of Husbands and Wives (1992). Guadagnino also creates a tone similar to that of Match Point (2005), Allen’s psychodrama/thriller about sexual infidelity and murder.

Why invite such comparisons to a script and, ultimately, a film that have neither the intellectual nor artistic heft of Allen at his best? Is Guadagnino offering some commentary on the accusations that have, in the past, been directed at Allen? Is he saying something about the men whose careers have been adversely impacted by #MeToo and cancel culture? If so, why are there no allusions to other accused men? And why risk directing even more ire at Allen from those who perceive After the Hunt to be an attack on #MeToo (which, it needs to be said, it is palpably not)?

The fundamental problem with After the Hunt is not that it compels us to ask questions about #MeToo and cancel culture – what better purpose for a film or any other piece of art than to drive us to question our ‘truths’? – but that it does it with so little conviction.

After the Hunt (Imagine Entertainment) is now screening in cinemas across Australia.