Film Review — After the Hunt

Luca Guadagnino is a director I generally admire. He had a strong year in 2024 with the popular Challengers and the more outré Queer, the latter of which was unfairly maligned and misunderstood in some quarters. I’m also a defender of Bones and All (2022), and I still think his best film to date is Call Me by Your Name (2017). Even his overegged remake of Suspiria (2018) has occasional points of interest, and I usually find something significant to appreciate in everything he puts out, until now.

Guadagnino’s new film, After the Hunt, doesn’t work for me at all. Set at Yale University, circa September 2019, the plot revolves around stomach-ulcer-prone philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts). She is one of two names potentially up for tenure, the other being her colleague and best pal Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield). At a party with her devoted psychiatrist husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), student liaison officer Dr Kim Sayers (Chloë Sevigny), and various students in attendance, one of the latter, Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), engages in academic banter with Hank about her thesis. In the course of the discussion, stereotypes informed by social media are established, with unoffendable Generation X professors on the one hand, and easily offended…