After the Hunt (2025) Amazon MGM/Drama RT: 139 minutes Rated R (language, some sexual content) Director: Luca Guadagnino Screenplay: Nora Garrett Music: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Cinematography: Malik Hassan Sayeed Release date: October 10, 2025 (US, limited)/October 17, 2025 (US, wide) Cast: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloe Sevigny, Lio Mehiel, Thaddea Graham, David Leiber, Will Price, Lailani Olan.
Rating: * ½
The key to understanding what Luca Guadagnino is going for in After the Hunt is a line spoken by Julia Roberts late in the film: “Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable.” That’s exactly how I felt while watching it. It’s not a pleasant movie. It deals with some harsh incendiary subject matter. All of the characters are bad. They’re right down there with the one from Closer (2004). I definitely felt uneasy watching it, but that’s not the main reason I hate it. Read on.
How can I put this nicely? Oh, screw that! After the Hunt is a pretentious POS. It’s so self-important. It wants to speak to our times. It uses all the buzzwords and pushes all the buttons. It focuses on cancel culture and how it ruins lives and the permanence of being cancelled. At the center of it is Roberts’ character Alma Imhoff, a respected philosophy professor at Yale on the verge of receiving tenure. That is, until an incident involving a female student threatens to derail it. It opens a whole Pandora’s Box of modern society’s evils.
The student in question is Maggie Resnick (Edebiri, The Bear), a PhD candidate who considers Alma a mentor and close friend. Maggie checks all the boxes; she’s black, gay (with a non-binary partner) and comes from a wealthy family. As such, it doesn’t even matter that she’s a mediocre student who doesn’t appear to fully understand what she’s writing her dissertation about. One day, she shows up at Alma’s apartment in tears. She claims to have been sexually assaulted after a dinner party at Alma’s the night before. Her alleged attacker is Hank Gibson (Garfield, The Eyes of Tammy Faye), a colleague and close friend of Alma’s. She’s not completely shocked to hear such an allegation leveled against her longtime friend. He’s always been kind of handsy.
Alma knows the right thing to do is report the attack, but she can’t quite bring herself to betray Hank. Also, she doesn’t really want to get involved. She’s has enough of her own drama- e.g. health issues and a substance abuse problem. On top of that, she may have been sexually assaulted herself when she was a teen. Then there’s the million dollar question. Did the rape really happen or did Maggie make it up to discredit Hank after he called her out for plagiarism? Alma is stuck in a moral quandary and it’s starting to affect her personally and professionally.
I am not enamored of Guadagnino’s work. He’s extremely overrated. His films are pretty to look at that, but that’s about it. I’ve only really liked one of his films, Bones and All (2022). The others, not so much; they’re what I call artistic masturbation. I still don’t know what to make of last year’s tennis-themed love triangle drama Challengers, but at least that had Zendaya in it. Admit it, you think she’s hot too. After the Hunt is simply awful. It’s boring and slow. It takes forever to go somewhere, but it eventually does. Okay, it has that going for it.
The characters, ALL of them, are horrible people, a bunch of overeducated, petty phonies without any redeeming qualities. This is especially true of Maggie, the supposed “victim” who’s nothing more than a spoiled, entitled Gen-Z brat who needs her environment to fit her comfortable worldview. Her relationship with Alma is more infatuation than anything. Initially, she dresses and carries herself like her mentor leading me to wonder is she has BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder). Alma is extremely abrasive and self-absorbed. The way she acts with Hank in front of her more-than-patient husband (Stuhlbarg, A Serious Man) at the dinner party is so disrespectful. Hank is just a whiny creep who throws a tantrum after losing his job. I get that not every movie character has to be likable and they don’t always have to be portrayed sympathetically. It just gets to be too much after a while.
Speaking of too much, it’s the perfect way to describe the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It’s overbearing and intrusive frequently drowning out the dialogue. It doesn’t always fit the moment. Then there’s that ticking sound that periodically shows up. I think it’s meant to symbolize a figurative time bomb waiting to go off. It sounds to me more like seconds of my life ticking away watching this terrible movie. And let’s not forget the opening credits sequence. It’s right out of a Woody Allen movie right down to the trademark font and jazzy theme music. What is that supposed to invoke? It tells me we’re about to see a bunch of academics engaging in intellectual, witty banter. It’s neither.
I don’t even know what to say about the acting in After the Hunt. It’s not bad I guess. They’re supposed to be playing terrible people, right? That being said, I never really cared for Garfield. He’s not convincing in any role he plays. He always looks like he’s about to burst out laughing. But again, it’s NOT the actors, it’s the horrible characters they portray. No need to rehash that though.
Since I firmly believe in giving credit where it’s due, the cinematography by Malik Hassan Sayeed is quite good. He captures the look, feel and even the smell of academic life. The interiors, rooms and offices furnished with shelves full of books, look exactly right. Unfortunately, it doesn’t save After the Hunt from failure. It’s one of those films where I didn’t care what happened because I didn’t care about any of the characters. At 139 minutes, it feels interminable. I have no doubt some will find it brilliant and insightful. I’d just like to forget it ever happened.
