{"id":13267,"date":"2025-10-18T16:59:36","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T20:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=13267"},"modified":"2025-11-11T11:57:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T16:57:03","slug":"after-the-hunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2025\/10\/18\/after-the-hunt\/","title":{"rendered":"After the Hunt"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"After the Hunt<\/strong> (2025)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Amazon MGM\/Drama\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 139 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (language, some sexual content)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Luca Guadagnino\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Nora Garrett\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Malik Hassan Sayeed\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: October 10, 2025 (US, limited)\/October 17, 2025 (US, wide)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloe Sevigny, Lio Mehiel, Thaddea Graham, David Leiber, Will Price, Lailani Olan.<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: * \u00bd<\/p>\n

\u00a0The key to understanding what Luca Guadagnino is going for in After the Hunt<\/strong> is a line spoken by Julia Roberts late in the film: \u201cNot everything is supposed to make you comfortable.\u201d That\u2019s exactly how I felt while watching it. It\u2019s not a pleasant movie. It deals with some harsh incendiary subject matter. All of the characters are bad. They\u2019re right down there with the one from Closer (2004). I definitely felt uneasy watching it, but that\u2019s not the main reason I hate it. Read on.<\/p>\n

\u00a0How can I put this nicely? Oh, screw that! After the Hunt<\/strong> is a pretentious POS. It\u2019s 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\u2019 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\u2019s Box of modern society\u2019s evils.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The 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\u2019s black, gay (with a non-binary partner) and comes from a wealthy family. As such, it doesn\u2019t even matter that she\u2019s a mediocre student who doesn\u2019t appear to fully understand what she\u2019s writing her dissertation about. One day, she shows up at Alma\u2019s apartment in tears. She claims to have been sexually assaulted after a dinner party at Alma\u2019s the night before. Her alleged attacker is Hank Gibson (Garfield, The Eyes of Tammy Faye), a colleague and close friend of Alma\u2019s. She\u2019s not completely shocked to hear such an allegation leveled against her longtime friend. He\u2019s always been kind of handsy.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Alma knows the right thing to do is report the attack, but she can\u2019t quite bring herself to betray Hank. Also, she doesn\u2019t really want to get involved. She\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s starting to affect her personally and professionally.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I am not enamored of Guadagnino\u2019s work. He\u2019s extremely overrated. His films are pretty to look at that, but that\u2019s about it. I\u2019ve only really liked one of his films, Bones and All (2022). The others, not so much; they\u2019re what I call artistic masturbation. I still don\u2019t know what to make of last year\u2019s tennis-themed love triangle drama Challengers, but at least that had Zendaya in it. Admit it, you think she\u2019s hot too. After the Hunt<\/strong> is simply awful. It\u2019s boring and slow. It takes forever to go somewhere, but it eventually does. Okay, it has that going for it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The 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 \u201cvictim\u201d who\u2019s 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\u2019t always have to be portrayed sympathetically. It just gets to be too much after a while.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Speaking of too much, it\u2019s the perfect way to describe the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It\u2019s overbearing and intrusive frequently drowning out the dialogue. It doesn\u2019t always fit the moment. Then there\u2019s that ticking sound that periodically shows up. I think it\u2019s 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\u2019s not forget the opening credits sequence. It\u2019s 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\u2019re about to see a bunch of academics engaging in intellectual, witty banter. It\u2019s neither.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I don\u2019t even know what to say about the acting in After the Hunt<\/strong>. It\u2019s not bad I guess. They\u2019re supposed to be playing terrible people, right? That being said, I never really cared for Garfield. He\u2019s not convincing in any role he plays. He always looks like he\u2019s about to burst out laughing. But again, it\u2019s NOT the actors, it\u2019s the horrible characters they portray. No need to rehash that though.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Since I firmly believe in giving credit where it\u2019s 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\u2019t save After the Hunt<\/strong> from failure. It\u2019s one of those films where I didn\u2019t care what happened because I didn\u2019t care about any of the characters. At 139 minutes, it feels interminable. I have no doubt some will find it brilliant and insightful. I\u2019d just like to forget it ever happened.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After the Hunt (2025)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Amazon MGM\/Drama\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 139 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (language, some sexual content)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Luca Guadagnino\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Nora Garrett\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Malik Hassan Sayeed\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: October 10, 2025 (US, limited)\/October 17, 2025 (US, wide)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloe Sevigny, Lio Mehiel, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13268,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dramas"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/After-the-Hunt-POSTER.jpg?fit=620%2C918&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13267"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13270,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13267\/revisions\/13270"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}