A Yale ethics professor finds herself caught in her own moral morass after a friend and colleague is accused of misconduct in After the Hunt, which premiered at last month’s Venice Film Festival and opens in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. This latest feature from Luca Guadagnino is certainly interesting, and certainly provocative, and certainly displays, if only in isolated scenes, the director’s finely-tuned craft for filmmaking. But it’s also an aggressively unpleasant film in both content and style, and imposes itself upon the audience in an obnoxious manner; some may find it brilliant, but for most, this is not only Guadagnino’s worst film, but one of the worst films a director of his stature could make.
There’s a lot going in After the Hunt before we even get to the movie. The title seems to reference Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, which charted the moral dilemmas faced by an intellectual, as well as Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Hunt, which starred Mads Mikkelsen as a teacher accused of sexual abuse. The opening titles, meanwhile, are in what any cinephile will immediately recognize as “Woody Allen Font”—namely, Windsor Light in white typeface against a black background, with cast members listed “(in alphabetical order)”.
What does invoking all this mean? The invocation itself appears to be the point, as the director drops hints of #MeToo scandal with all the subtlety of South Park’s Member Berries. Woody Allen and Rolling Stone‘s “A Rape on Campus” are to After the Hunt what Chewbacca and the Millennium Falcon were to the Star Wars sequels. ‘Member the time that we are very much currently living in? Yeah, I ‘member.
After the Hunt begins in proper at the home of Professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) and her husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), during a party attended by Alma’s colleague and close friend Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) and her student and mentee Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri). After some philosophical debate, Hank and Maggie will leave together. By this point, we already know that Hank is a blowhard, and that he has touched Maggie’s knee in an inappropriate manner.
That’s where the trouble starts: Maggie will next approach Alma with an accusation of impropriety against of Hank, though Nora Garrett’s script conceals exactly what he is accused of doing for the entire movie; “Do I have to say?” Maggie states. “He crossed a line.” Hank, for his part, will claim that he approached Maggie—after the party, drunk, and in her apartment—with accusations that she plagiarized her dissertation, and that this is her revenge. Uh-huh.
Alma—and the viewer—is then tasked with the difficult proposition of taking sides. But what sides are there to take? The film does so much heavy lifting to assail Maggie’s character—she’s wealthy, she’s performative, she’s invasive, we can take the teachers’ word that she’s a cheater, and she uses her status as a Black, lesbian, woman to curate public support—that we don’t especially like her.
But these character flaws can be excused by her youth, and while we don’t even know what she’s accusing Hank of, we don’t need to take her word: we see him violating the teacher-student relationship, and even if we think he shouldn’t be tarred and feathered, we can accept that he must bear this responsibility. After the Hunt, after all is said and done, is a lot less nuanced than David Mamet’s Oleanna, which tackled much of the same subject matter more than 30 years ago.
Beyond the story, After the Hunt is an unusually unappealing film to look at. The opening party sets the scene: lighting is a precious resource, rarely spared on the actors, who sometimes seem to be out-of-focus. The screen is cluttered, and our eyes struggle to locate something to fix upon. Cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed’s color palette is a murky sea of browns and greens. The rest of the film follows in style.
This isn’t an accident; it’s a choice. In some of Garfield’s early scenes, he’s illuminated as if by spotlight; in one key moment later on, he’s shot against a window during daytime, so we only see the outline of his head as a silhouette delivers the big speech. A brilliant commentary on his transition from an object of the film’s affection to the anonymous Other? Perhaps. But for anyone watching this movie and hoping to observe what is happening on screen, an exercise in frustration. Roberts gives an arresting performance here, but she, too, is not spared, delivering her climactic monologue under a blanket of shadows.
A soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, too, seems designed to annoy the viewer. Their work on Guadagnino’s Challengers was one of the best film scores in recent years, and they continue to release phenomenal work, as recently as last week in Tron: Ares. Their low-key jazz score here is largely anonymous, if generally effective, but also at times discordant and atonal; a sudden trumpet, at multiple points, almost functions as a jump scare. We can’t even enjoy the classics played by Stuhlbarg’s character, which are intentionally played at an aggressively high volume and drown out the film’s dialogue.
After the Hunt is something of an experiment that may resonate with some viewers, perhaps the kind of intellectuals who feature in the film. If you can watch a movie that’s underlit, out-of-focus, cluttered, and murky and find that presentation brilliant because it serves as commentary on the moral complexities of its characters and story, well, this movie might be for you. If you’d like to be able to see what is on the screen in a more literal sense, however, After the Hunt may test your patience more than your intellect.
