Luca Guadagnino is on a hot streak, the kind all filmmakers dream of: a movie or two every year, with twice as many projects in development, some of which might see the light of day. He’s just finished shooting his Sam Altman AI movie Artificial, and this past weekend, his latest, After the Hunt, was released nationwide. Screenwriter Nora Garrett makes her debut here with a script that everyone wanted their hands on: Deadline reported in March 2024 that, “the spec [script] has been one of the more talked-about scripts in recent memory, with several agents telling Deadline it’s one of the better scripts they’ve read since the writers strike ended.”
While promoting Queer last December, Guadagnino told Marc Maron that, “[The film] is about what happens in the milieu of academia between older and younger people. It tackles the idea of consent. The movie is very provocative… I’ve been a fan of Julia forever, as a movie star, she has something that not everybody has, and, I’m trying not to be presumptive, but I feel like this is the best performance she’s ever given.”
Maybe so, but that’s a low bar. After the Hunt was already being test-screened last year, and Guadagnino may have had a “topical” film on his hands back then, but now, it’s as moldy as One Battle After Another, desperate to correct a record which most everyone has moved beyond. Julia Roberts plays a Yale professor on the verge of tenure—the cliché equivalent of the cop with one last day on the job—alongside colleagues Andrew Garfield, Chloe Sevigny, husband Michael Stuhlbarg, and student Ayo Edebiri. After a party, Garfield and Edebiri, his student, walk home smiling; the next day, Edebiri tells Roberts that Garfield assaulted him. She’s hesitant to believe her, but before she can do anything, it snowballs and she’s stealing prescription pads and getting up in Edebiri’s face.
Garrett told The Times that, “When I started writing, people said it reminded them of Tár and I said, ‘I can’t watch it—because I’m going to see somebody do something much better and I’m going to stop writing.’” Well, she nailed that one: Todd Field’s film was far more elusive and esoteric, not strictly a #MeToo or cancellation movie but a brooding character study of one of the more interesting people to emerge in 2020s American cinema. After the Hunt has none of Tár’s subtlety or artistry, and its few, small aesthetic provocations are tepid. The credits are in Windsor Light, Woody Allen’s signature font, and there are jokes about Morrissey, pronouns, and “obscure protests.” Tár dwelled under the surface, whereas everything in After the Hunt is on top, dialogue not spoken but declaimed by mouthpieces, hardly “characters” at all. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know the movie’s attitude; it’s still surprising when that turns out to be all on offer here.
For 139 minutes, Roberts and co. perform a running monologue against #MeToo, late-2010s political correctness, academic politics, and the “entitlement” of young people today. It’s didactic and one-note from the beginning, without ever letting up; Guadagnino offers none of the style or personality that elevated Challengers and gave life to Queer. Malik Hassan Sayeed returns to feature filmmaking here after 27 years, but the cinematographer under lights most of the movie and performs some bafflingly bad dolly moves. I know Guadagnino is on a roll, and six weeks of production for a long movie is pretty tight, but the craft here is embarrassing at times. It’s also edited incoherently, leapfrogging from every possible setup in every scene, destroying any momentum or life that might’ve been percolating.
But what to do with this script? More movies should address the present and the recent past, and I’m all for liberal correctives and takedowns, but this is as sophisticated as one of Ricky Gervais’ monologues about being an atheist. Guadagnino calls out “CUT!” at the end of the last shot, a strange non-sequitur close-up of a $20 bill, but all I could hear being whispered during the rest of the movie was Gervais’ smug wheedling, “Are you not offended??” Movies that successfully needle their targets—Tár, Eddington, The Sweet East—aren’t easily ignored. People get pissed, and they trash the movie, keeping it in conversation longer than its fans. After the Hunt won’t have defenders or detractors because it’s, above all else, a very BORING movie.
To quote sage Jim Gaffigan, “I’m not offended, but I have to go.”
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith