After The Hunt Movie Review
Directing his third film in 2 years, the quality of Luca Guadagnino’s output is impressive when you look at the cultural buzz he made with Challengers, and how the divisive but somewhat revered Queer led to a career best performance from Daniel Craig. But even with a star studded cast of heavy hitting actors in Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield at his disposal, with a story that is culturally relevant and ripe for exploration, it’s truly astounding at how disappointing After The Hunt turned out to be.
Taking place at Yale University, this first time screenplay from Nora Garrett follows philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Roberts), who is in contention for tenure as the next college dean – a position also being headhunted by her former protege, now professor, Hank (Garfield). Imhoff has professors and PhD candidate students over for a soiree, an event that leads the intoxicated Hank to go home with Maggie (Edebiri), the current protege of Imhoff, where in the days following, Maggie accuses Hank of sexually assaulting her.
With complicated aspects between both sets of Imhoff’s relationships with the involved parties creating difficulty of determining who she should believe, a rapid descent into emotional and psychological chaos begins to consume and cause conflict in Imhoff’s life, while the seemingly more pressing issues play out around her, despite her desire to not be involved.
In a post-#MeToo movement society, and with how abrasively, yet intriguingly a filmmaker like Gudagnino has broached topics in his films prior, it’s surprising how shallow After The Hunt feels. The narrative never dances around the subject of assault against women, and it can be argued that the fascinating aspect of this story is almost the denunciation of its severity in such an upper-class world of professors and students of Yale – a place where image is everything. But Garrett’s script never feels like diving below the surface level of exploration, giving off the tonally off-putting atmosphere of something more akin to The Days of our Lives than Tar (which explores a lot of similar themes in a similar setting).
The technical aspects of the film don’t help the tonal issues either, with the performances ranging from stoic and strong (predominantly Roberts, who is the film’s biggest strength), to wildly theatrical and over the top (Garfield), to unfortunately miscast or misdirected (Edebiri). There are also supporting performances that stand out, and not in complimentary ways. One of those characters has a line in the film, that verbatim was, “It’s all about optics these days, not substance.” And despite that line being delivered in an amateur style, it really does sum up After The Hunt well.
Guadagnino’s painting-like visual style and patient pacing (both staples of his directorial style) give a familiarity to After the Hunt that audiences will connect with.
Once again collaborating with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for the score however is one of the more disappointing elements of the film considering the immense talent. There is an off putting, off-key, off-time score that is far more intrusive than immersive, taking away any sincerity that a scene is trying to convey, and making the audience constantly remember that this is a movie, and not a “real thing in the real world” – something that perhaps with a subject matter as serious as this, should’ve been treated as such.
In a rare miss from Gudagnino, the slow, plodding pace that inherently explores nothing of substance in the narrative isn’t in any way saved by decent, but disappointing performances all-round, or the incredible technical aspects expected of the team behind the scenes.
After The Hunt is in Australian cinemas October 16
