Everything in Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” appears carefully calculated, signposted with a slick insistence, as if the movie is worried you’ll miss some vital point. Over and over we observe Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) quietly drop two brownish capsules — not medication, more of an herbal supplement — onto the night stand next to his sleeping wife, Alma (Julia Roberts), then kiss her and creep away. Repeatedly we’re shown the book resting on that night stand: Thomas Mann’s 1901 novel “Buddenbrooks.”
The camera keeps returning to lingering shots of hands, specifically those of Alma and of Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), Alma’s star doctoral student, both of whom favor short nails painted in black. This all seems to matter greatly.
So do some unmistakable references to Woody Allen’s films, and ticking clocks on the soundtrack, and the fact that Alma usually wears white, with a black blazer thrown on top. Even the characters’ names in Nora Garrett’s screenplay seem to be referring to something: Frederik and Alma seem borrowed from Ingmar Bergman, while Alma’s closest colleague and friend, Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) — a nickname for either Henry or Henrik — seems an awful lot like a homonym for the playwright Henrik Ibsen.
And because Hank and Alma are assistant professors of philosophy in hot pursuit of tenure, the story is littered with philosophical name-drops: we hear about Foucault’s panopticon, and Adorno’s “Minima Moralia,” and Freud’s misogyny and, in an unfortunate moment, Hegel’s lack of control over “little Hegel,” with a crotchward hand gesture to match. Maggie’s dissertation is on “the resurgence of virtue ethics,” and Hank is confident she is lifting some of it directly from Giorgio Agamben’s 1995 text “Homo Sacer,” though it’s never explained how she’d make one fit the other. And when we first meet our principal players — these four, plus the psychotherapist Kim (Chloë Sevigny), who also serves as a sort of liaison to the students on campus — they are yammering over wine in Alma and Frederik’s book-stacked living room about “the perceived existence of a collective morality” and the “teleological pursuit” of tenure.
But all these signals and symbols and hints jangle incoherently together. From start to finish, “After the Hunt” sets its audience adrift on a sea of unmoored signifiers, flailing to keep up with all the arm-wavey gestures at “academia” and “bourgeois morality” and “ethics,” providing nothing beneath to hold it all together and indicate it knows what any of it means.
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