The following contains spoilers for After the Hunt.
After the Hunt, the latest film from the director Luca Guadagnino, seems designed to inspire debates about “cancel culture.” Set in 2019 amid the #MeToo movement, the movie follows a group of academics in Yale’s philosophy department who are embroiled in a sexual-assault scandal. The characters are perfectly comfortable discussing morality. But as soon as they’re made to confront their personal beliefs, philosophy becomes, as Guadagnino put it in an interview at the New York Film Festival, something of a “special effect”—the fuel that can turn any conversation incendiary.
The movie, now in theaters, hinges on a provocative event: Maggie (played by The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri) accuses a popular professor, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assault. Hank’s colleague, the enigmatic Alma (Julia Roberts), is subsequently caught between the two—the student who worships her, and one of her closest friends. The most daring scene, though, arrives right at the end: In a brief epilogue, Alma reunites with Maggie five years after the allegation dissolved their relationship. The women are disinterested in relitigating what happened. Instead, they insist upon their own happiness: Alma has recovered from the drama; she’s now a dean at Yale. Maggie, too, is thriving—engaged, with a giant ring she shows off to her former mentor. After their conversation wraps, the camera lingers on Alma until Guadagnino, from somewhere off-screen, calls out, “Cut!”
The director’s voice breaks the fourth wall with as much subtlety as a character waking up to say that everything was merely a dream. The moment is jarring, and implies that everything that happened on-screen until then shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Some critics have interpreted the ending as a glib last-minute twist that threatens to neutralize the story’s potency and dismisses the seriousness of the movie’s premise. Among the other complaints: There seems to be no point, beyond pure button-pushing, to using a Woody Allen–style typeface in the opening credits, thereby referencing a real-life disgraced figure. The script is blanketed in sweeping claims found in online discourse about sex and gender, but it ultimately has little to say about cancel culture. Perhaps its message is meant to be deliberately ambiguous—or maybe there’s no message at all.
Yet Guadagnino’s decision to insert himself into the movie’s final beat is revealing, in that it clarifies more about After the Hunt than anything that precedes it. The scene illuminates the story’s preoccupation not with the post-#MeToo world but with performance, hints of which can be found throughout the film. An early sequence finds Alma and Hank theatrically debating, before a collection of awed students, whether any of the philosophers they study led a wholly moral life. Inside Alma’s home, her husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), acts the part of the dutiful spouse when guests come over, baking a tart for Alma’s colleagues; alone, he falls asleep to porn. Alma visits the dean of humanities to talk about Maggie’s accusation, but they don’t discuss how the assault may have happened—or the fact that Maggie just attended Alma’s boozy, intimate dinner party, which encouraged a fair amount of boundary-blurring. Instead, the dean worries about how the situation will come off to the rest of the academic community. “Against all odds,” he says, “I’ve found myself in the business of optics, not substance.”
Studied mannerisms inform every relationship in the film. The movie questions whether anyone is telling the truth: whether Maggie falsely accused Hank in order to deflect how she plagiarized her dissertation, whether Hank’s pitiful self-deprecation is an act belying a disturbingly aggressive demeanor, and even whether Alma actually cares about her students. But truths go ignored, the film argues, when everyone prefers inventing realities for themselves. Consider the fantastical visual language Guadagnino deploys—he frequently captures characters via their reflections, including a moment in which Hank is positioned in front of a pair of intersecting mirrored walls; his gesticulating makes him look like a many-tentacled beast. Alma, who seems to almost always be hiding behind a mask, fades from her couch at one point via a bit of camera trickery, like she’s a ghost.
After the Hunt, in other words, is not what it initially seems like it might be: a film that examines changing cultural mores. Rather, it’s a cynical movie in which characters carefully position themselves for maximum validation. This need to be seen as morally good poisons them all—the more Alma stands up for Maggie in public while doubting her in private, the more Alma’s health deteriorates. The more Frederik keeps up a facade of warmth in his marriage, the more he descends into cruelty. After the Hunt pointedly avoids showing the faculty’s deliberations on Hank’s firing—the titular hunt, if you will—in favor of examining how each of its characters, indifferent to what actually happened, insists on being perceived as correct.
Guadagnino, in interviews since the film’s debut at the Venice Film Festival, in August, has waved off critiques that the film is hollow. He has resisted the notion that After the Hunt is a “movie about #MeToo,” calling the label “a bit of a lazy way to describe it.” And, he’s noted, the choice to insert his own voice into the story’s final seconds is nothing but a way to remind the audience that the film is, well, a film. “Once we say ‘Cut,’ we invite the audience to think that this is a movie,” he said at the New York Film Festival. “We wanted to entertain them.”
After the Hunt does entertain. The production design impressively transforms a London soundstage into New Haven, the plot is fabulously convoluted, and Roberts is particularly compelling to watch, clearly relishing the opportunity to deliver a slippery performance. The film around her is equally slick, using as its backdrop a moment in recent history when people in power felt under the microscope. It never peers through that microscope itself, but in its final moment—“Cut!”—After the Hunt invites the viewer to do so instead.
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