“After the Hunt,” Luca Guadagnino’s psychological thriller about the fallout from the #MeToo movement, has been in theaters for only a few days, but it already feels dated. It’s a memento of the micro-era, toward the exhausted end of Joe Biden’s presidency, when the backlash against self-righteous progressivism was cresting, and taking on sanctimonious college students seemed, at least in some circles, like a brave provocation.
Now, at a moment of ferocious federal government repression of the campus left, “After the Hunt” is a bit of a silly anachronism. It’s interesting mostly for what it inadvertently reveals about the seething resentments that helped set the stage for today’s right-wing crackdown.
“It has gotten so hard for me to listen to these kids, when they have had everything, everything handed to them in their lives, insist that the world stop at the first small injustice,” says a school counselor played by Chloë Sevigny, using an obscenity. That peevish spirit animates much of the movie, which turns on not one but two possibly made-up allegations of sexual abuse.
In 2018, the Democratic strategist Aaron Huertas coined the term “reactionary centrism” to describe a style of politics that prides itself on even-handedness while being disproportionately obsessed with left-wing overreach. Always deployed as an epithet, “reactionary centrism” is overused by progressives to inoculate themselves from criticism. But it describes a real ethos — a loathing of wokeness so intense it led some elite former Democrats to support Donald Trump. “After the Hunt” brings reactionary centrism to prestige cinema.
The film stars Julia Roberts as Alma, a Yale philosophy professor on the verge of tenure after an unspecified break from academia. At a cocktail party at the home she shares with her psychotherapist husband, Frederik, we meet her brash friend and colleague Hank, played by Andrew Garfield, and her protégée, Maggie, played by Ayo Edebiri. We see Maggie and Hank leave together, and soon after, Maggie tells Alma that Hank has sexually assaulted her. Hank, in turn, insists that Maggie made up the story after he confronted her about plagiarism. The resulting campus hysteria threatens to destroy not just Hank, but Alma too.
There’s nothing wrong with making a movie about the anguish of cancellation, like the brilliant 2022 film “Tár,” or about an ambiguous claim of sexual transgression. “After the Hunt” fails not because of its premise, but because it’s overwrought and self-satisfied. It’s about the terrifying power of the mob, with the mob conceived as the unreasonably angry students of the Ivy League.
Some of the first words we hear are Roberts lecturing about Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”: “Foucault paints a picture of public torture performed in order to maintain the social contract,” she says. Then come the opening credits, which, in an apparent gesture of solidarity with Woody Allen, are rendered in his signature style: names listed alphabetically in white Windsor Light font against a black background.
A trigger warning: There are some spoilers ahead. We never find out what happened between Maggie and Hank, or even, exactly, what Maggie claims to have happened. She tells Alma that they were drinking in her apartment, he kissed her, and kept going after she said no. When Alma asks for specifics, Maggie gets offended: “Why do you need to know? He assaulted me!” Even after Hank is fired — which seems to happen almost overnight — we never learn whether he was accused of a kiss that went on too long, a rape or something in between, as if the school’s regime is so arbitrary that it doesn’t matter.
What we do learn is that Maggie really is a plagiarist. Her professors, it turns out, only pretend to think she’s brilliant because she’s the daughter of megadonors and, presumably, because she’s Black and queer. (This isn’t a combination you see much in real life, where the kids of big-time donors are overwhelmingly white, but it underlines the movie’s sense that ostensibly marginalized identities are really sources of unearned advantage.) “You are the worst kind of mediocre student,” Alma hisses during a confrontation. “With every availability to succeed, but no talent or desire to do so, yet so many resources, so much of other people’s time is wasted on you.”
And we discover the dark secret that haunts Alma throughout the movie. In the penultimate scene, she reveals that, as a teenager, she had an affair with her father’s best friend. Then, in a jealous rage when he moved on, she falsely accused him of sexual assault, leading, eventually, to his suicide. “He was a good man, and I destroyed him with a lie,” she tells her husband. Frederik tries to convince her that a 15-year-old can’t meaningfully consent to sex with an adult. But I’m not sure we’re supposed to believe him; the movie is less interested in the lasting scars of sexual abuse than the harms wrought by strident, vengeful denunciations.
While “After the Hunt” plays coy about its central mystery, to one of its producers, Brian Grazer, its message is clear. “Before this project existed, I was very much in the anti-woke category — it just got too extreme,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “And this movie shows the damage of that by dealing with false accusations on the Yale campus.”
Grazer, of course, is the longtime Democratic donor who shocked Hollywood by revealing that he voted for Donald Trump last year. He’s been a bit vague about why, telling The Times, “As a centrist, it was because I could feel and see Biden’s deterioration and the lack of direction in the Democratic Party.” Watching “After the Hunt,” I felt I could better understand the worldview of men like him. The movie offers insight into the politics of victimhood, just not in the way its creators intended.
Source photographs by Yannis Drakoulidis/Amazon Content Services, via Associated Press.
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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
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