In the movies, and sometimes in real life, academics are people who go to parties specifically to cluster in animated little conversational groups where they can drop references to Hegel and Kant and Nietzsche to their hearts’ desire. At any rate, those are the types of academics who populate After the Hunt, Luca Guadagnino’s cartoonishly solemn drama, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. An early scene, a party at the home of an up-for-tenure Yale professor played by Julia Roberts, is filled with that kind of thinky-talky dialogue. As you watch, you might think, as I did, that surely these people can’t go through the whole movie talking like this, in spiraling loops of jibber-jabber concerning the nature of free will, the role of individual morality within societal structures, and so on. Sadly, you would be wrong (though in their defense, most of the characters in After the Hunt are philosophy academics, so they’re allowed a few extra dollops of pretentiousness). Maybe Guadagnino and first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett are betting that these urbane, chattery people are folks you wish you could rub shoulders with in real life. I suppose that’d be OK; be right there, after I finish scrubbing the grout in the bathroom and scouring two years’ worth of grease off the oven rack.
After the Hunt is both ultra-serious and wacky, set in a world where people do inexplicable things for no good reason and expect us to follow along, nodding and thinking, But of course! Reserved, enigmatic Yale philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Roberts) appears to be one of the most popular personalities in her department. She’s married to shrink Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), who mostly pads around their massive cozy-luxurious flat listening to atonal music, whipping up crocks full of cassoulet, and making smarty-pants quips. Yet at least two other people appear to be in love with Alma. She’s very close with a younger colleague, Andrew Garfield’s Hank—they cuddle like puppies, though it seems Alma is keeping things platonic. And one of her own star graduate students is so obsessed with her that even Frederik points it out with annoyance. Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) is allegedly brilliant—everyone keeps saying so—but she’s really just rich: her parents have given the university a huge endowment, so everyone tiptoes around her gingerly. She’s also gay, which should be of no consequence, though everyone around her mentions it as much as possible. At the aforementioned party, she excuses herself to use the bathroom and proceeds to snoop in, apparently, every single cabinet, including a nondescript one stacked with toilet paper. There she finds an envelope, and when she opens it, a flutter of secrets drop to the floor. This is an envelope full of—you guessed it—secret stuff about Alma’s past that she doesn’t want anyone to find. Even at this point in the story, you know there’s something untrustworthy about Maggie, though we’re supposed to stumble through much of the movie giving her the benefit of the doubt.
The next day, Maggie returns to Alma’s home in tears, her nerves aquiver and her words spilling out in a stammer. She tells Alma that the night before, Hank—who had spent much of the party praising her brilliance—had walked her home, invited himself inside her modest apartment (her partner wasn’t home), and sexually assaulted her. She begs Alma to keep this a secret, but also demands rather than asks for her support. Though Alma wants to be a good friend to a student she likes, she hesitates, and Maggie is rankled.
From here, a circuitous and not particularly scintillating sequence of events unfurls. Maggie is not what she seems—or maybe she’s exactly what she seems, given that we’ve already seen her furtively rummaging around in a toilet-paper cabinet. It turns out that Hank, played by a wonderful actor whose characters generally radiate warmth, has a nasty, angry streak. (Garfield is good enough to make that believable, but this is the kind of character that feels written to serve a specific plot function, as opposed to one who feels like real human being.) Alma is torn between believing the story of a student she ostensibly cares about and being loyal to Hank. It doesn’t help that she suffers from mysterious stomach pains that come and go and require her to furtively shake pills out of little bottles stashed here and there.
What a tangled web we weave! But let’s not be so shallow as to focus only on the plot. For After the Hunt is also a movie of ideas: “Young people today,” whatever that means, are too fixated on identity and labeling, and they want, as one character charges, a world with all the sharp edges rounded off. We need to believe women—but what if there’s some doubt that a particular woman is telling the truth? Also, men can lie, and especially if they’re white, they rule the world. How can any of us win against that, especially in academia? Against all of this allegedly heady stuff, the score—by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross—intentionally jars us from encroaching drowsiness with chortling woodwinds and shardlike piano chords that are the aural equivalent of jagged Plexiglass off-cuts. Remember, this isn’t just a movie; it’s art.
Shot by Malik Hassan Sayeed, the whole enterprise looks handsome enough, in a hallowed-halls-of-the-Ivy League way. But Roberts, usually a vibrant presence at the very least, looks trapped and perpetually pained: one minute she’s clutching her stomach, the next she’s furrowing her brow as she struggles to figure out the motivations of those around her. This is what you’d call a serious role, but it’s not a challenging or meaty one. Why cast Julia Roberts only to sap all the life out of her? Her scenes with Edebiri are particularly drab and circuitous. Edebiri, too, feels sapped of life. Her character stammers and stutters, wheedles and begs, threatens and demands, but you never get any sense of who she is or what she really feels, until a coda at the end conveniently explains it all. The complexities of her character are only the most obvious ones: she’s highly privileged, but also gay and Black, and she can wield any of those factors as a weapon if she chooses to. Those are potentially fascinating conflicts, explored haphazardly. Then there’s an incomprehensible scene in which Stuhlbarg’s Frederik storms in and out of the kitchen angrily, having turned his music up to an unlistenable volume, while Alma and Maggie—a guest in their home that evening—try to have a serious conversation.
It’s supposed to mean something, but what? Guadagnino leaves it to our imagination. He has made some gorgeous, stirring movies—I Am Love and Queer among them—but After the Hunt feels more like an artistic thesis, and despite its needling provocations, it offers fewer cerebral pleasures than he thinks. The only actor who looks at home here is Chloë Sevigny as Kim, the resident Yale Philosophy Department psychotherapist, who struts through the movie in a series of baggy suits and a curly bowl haircut that wouldn’t be out of place on the Beverly Hillbillies’ Miss Jane Hathaway. She owns the movie’s single greatest moment: sitting with Alma at a college watering hole, she marvels that they’re playing a Morrissey song on the jukebox, given that he’s become persona non grata for his far-right political views. Alma corrects her: it’s not a Morrissey song that’s playing, but one by Morrissey’s band, the Smiths. (It’s “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.”) Sevigny responds with a “same difference” shrug and goes back to her goblet of red wine. Not every encounter or exchange needs to entail a lesson in semantics, or the tyranny of cultural sensitivity, or the dominance of white males in academia and everywhere else. Sometimes a Morrissey song is just a Morrissey song. Even if it’s by the Smiths.
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