After the Hunt review: This Julia Roberts academia drama doesn't make the grade
A starry cast including Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri can't save a script that too frequently gets bogged down in philosophical debates.
Amazon MGM Studios
- James Mottram
★★☆☆☆
After the Hunt is in cinemas from 17 October. Add it to your watchlist
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Julia Roberts has never been afraid of heavyweight subject matter, on the rare occasions Hollywood has given her the chance. Take Erin Brockovich, a film about a class action suit brought against a water company that was perfectly tailored to her skillset. And so it goes with After the Hunt, a campus-set story of abuse, privilege and the generational divide all set in the world of academia.
She plays Alma Imhoff, a philosophy professor at Yale, who lives in one of those luxurious houses you only ever see in movies. Aiming to become tenured, she spends her days debating the finer points of Kierkegaard and Hegel, with her acolytes, including flirty fellow academic Hank (Andrew Garfield) and earnest PhD student Maggie (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri).
At the outset, she and her husband Fredrik (Michael Stuhlbarg) are hosting drinks. Maggie, who is gay and in a relationship, is escorted home by Hank. But before long, she is back on Alma’s doorstep, sobbing. She explains: Hank came up for a drink, while Maggie’s partner was absent. They kissed, but it went further than she wanted. “He assaulted me,” she says. But did he?
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When Alma confronts Hank, he claims it all stems from a discovery he made about Maggie, that she plagiarised her dissertation. With her parents billionaire donors to the university, Maggie comes from a background of wealth and entitlement. That she is also Black adds to the complex dynamic, with Maggie operating in a world largely dominated by straight white cis men.
As tempers flare, Maggie decides to press charges against Hank, while Alma tries to steer clear, fearful of her own position. Scripted by actress Nora Garrett, making her debut as a screenwriter here, what follows is a battle of wills. Suffering from an illness that’s causing her to vomit, Alma starts to unravel as relations between her and Maggie morphs into something more pernicious.
Ayo Edebiri as Maggie and Julia Roberts as Alma in After the Hunt 2025 Amazon Content Services LLC.
Directing this is Luca Guadagnino, the Italian filmmaker behind the more plainly enjoyable Call Me by Your Name (which featured Stuhlbarg) and Challengers. But After the Hunt feels like a muddled film that gets away from him, too often filled with characters mired in academic debates about morals and ethics that will likely go over most viewers’ heads, unless you happen to be a philosophy graduate.
Bizarrely, the film also starts exactly like a Woody Allen film: the jazzy score, over black-and-white titles, with the cast listed in alphabetical order, a tradition that Allen employed for years across his canon. Is it an homage to Allen? Or a subtle nod to the personal issues that have blighted his life in later years? According to Guadagnino, it could be a bit of both.
It’s not the only time the director borrows from other, better works. Todd Field’s cancel culture tale Tár, set in the similarly cloistered world of classical music, tackled the subject with much greater complexity. And then, Justine Triet’s Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall, with its prickly use of loud music interrupting a conversation, gets a nod, in a grating dinner scene involving Maggie, Fredrik and Alma.
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With a whiny score by the usually on-point Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, at least it has Julia Roberts in full swing. The actress relishes shouldering such a wannabe watercooler film, and there’s something pleasurable in watching her character gradually lose it (including her shocking abuse of Maggie’s non-binary partner). But this isn’t an easy film to digest, perhaps because it’s filled with “privileged, coddled hypocrites”, as one person says. Still, as a portrait set on the frontlines of ‘woke-dom’, it gives a hornets’ nest a real kicking.
Authors
James Mottram
James Mottram is a London-based film critic, journalist, and author.
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