AFTER THE HUNT -- #MeToo Thriller Suffers Shallow Commentary, Lands Class Critique

Review by Daniel Lima

On the surface, After the Hunt seems like a dinosaur. A #MeToo thriller in 2025, rehashing the same arguments and conversations people were having almost a decade ago in a world that has so radically shifted away from those talking points, is a tough pill to swallow. For most of its runtime, it seems like director Luca Guadagnino has completely lost touch with where culture is at, offering nothing meaningful or insightful to say about a topic that is at once so sensitive and so well-trodden. It is only at the eleventh hour that the film finally reveals that it has more on its mind than relitigating old debates.

Oh, but what a taxing journey that is at times. Set at Yale University and the surrounding town, the film follows the case of a grad student (Ayo Edibiri) that accuses a professor (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault. The charge leads to major disruption of campus life, particularly for the professor’s highly respected colleague and close friend (Julia Roberts), who now must contend with interpersonal and professional challenges as well as a troubled past of her own.

It is obvious that Guadagnino is not particularly interested in the he said/she said back and forth of these kinds of accusations, nor the actual mechanics of an investigation like this. Instead, he homes in on the effect on the individual characters, and what the situation reveals about who they are as people. Garfield goes from affable academic to frenzied and despondent pariah; Edibiri remains resolute, adopting the language of the so-called “social justice warrior”. Roberts own feelings and motivations remain vexing for most of the film, but watching her buckle under the weight of her allegiances and the expectations of others is perhaps the most nuanced that the film gets.

The issue with the film’s examination of the fallout of a rape allegation is that it is so shallow. There are impassioned defenses, equally impassioned recriminations, yet it all has the tenor and complexity of a Jezebel article circa 2017. The dialogue never sounds like those of people in an emotionally fraught situation attempting to put into words feelings they’re only just beginning to untangle. Instead, they come out fully formed, as if the characters are all reading well-curated blog posts. To some extent this is a stylistic choice, as all these people are highly educated academics, but the effect is an emotional distance between the unfolding drama and the audience.

Though it is a bit expected that a movie like After the Hunt would remain coy about the exact truth about what happened between Edibiri and Garfield (after all, the general public rarely gets every detail of a rape accusation confirmed in real life) it is also fair to question where exactly does the artist in question stand on the issues being probed. If Guadagnino is willing to return to a time where buzzwords like “safe spaces” and “cancel culture” were all the rage, at a time where the former is under assault and the latter has greatly diminished — if it ever existed at all — then one would expect him to offer some insight, some perspective, at least voice an opinion of the time and its relevancy to the current sociopolitical moment. Nothing of the sorts ends up being articulated; if anything, even the surface-level jabs at liberal culture at the end of the 2010s are muddled by certain character revelations.

Of course, artists are not moral guardians, and it would be wrong to go into a film like this assuming that the crew behind it has a moral imperative to articulate a grand statement on the nature of cases such as this. That said, they did choose to make this movie. Rape culture is real, women continue to be victimized by men with impunity, and at a time where even the minuscule gains on moving the is conversation to a more empathetic place are being actively attacked by those in power, it certainly comes across as tone deaf at best to present a story like this with absolutely nothing definitive to say on the matter.

There is, however, more to After the Hunt than just this narrative. The film opens with a dinner party at the home of Roberts and her husband, a beautiful apartment playing host to a collection of bright minds and cultural elites. It is impossible not to think of how shallow this environment is: the ensemble verbally spars in philosophical debates that are surprisingly elementary considering their station, the partygoers so self-assured in their intellectual superiority, the gathering so sequestered away from the daily lived experience of so many.

This feeling never quite goes away. Every character is concerned not only with the allegation itself, but how it affects their social station. Both Garfield and Roberts are on a tenure track, influencing how they navigate the situation. Edibiri adopts much of the language of social activists of the time, emphasizing her position as black woman navigating male and white dominated spaces, but neglects to ever bring up that her parents are fabulously wealthy donors who have secured her place at the institution through their generosity. Even the tangled web of romantic interests is underscored by where everyone sits in relation to each other, with Edibiri’s fascination with Roberts rooted in her authority figure role as well as her age, while Roberts flirtations with Garfield come from his status as a peer.

Then there is the fact that the very idea of tackling this subject in 2025 feels so… quaint. That’s not to say that the issue of sexual violence, particularly in institutional settings like higher education, is any less relevant today, but all the talking points of the film so closely mirror those from years ago that it all feels old hat. As books are added to ban lists, diversity initiatives are dismantled, student activists and protesters are prosecuted and silenced, how animated can one be about a plea for safe spaces? How important is this culture war flash point really, especially on an Ivy League campus among elites?

SPOILER WARNING

It is only in the closing moments of the movie, the part that is actually after the hunt, that Guadagnino reveals that this is actually the thesis. Skipping forward five years — revealing everything that preceded took place just before the COVID-19 pandemic — Roberts is seated in her lushly decorated office, watching news footage of the Palisades fire from January of this year. She remarks to her assistant, “Horrible, isn’t it,” then goes out to meet Edibiri for a drink. Through their rather testy discussion, it’s revealed that everyone is doing just fine. Edibiri is now engaged to a much older woman with a plump media job, the accused sex pest is a highly paid Democratic operative, even Edibiri’s college partner is a successful lawyer. She makes this clear to Roberts with her parting words: “You did it. You won.”

When you’re let into the club, you come out a winner, no matter who else loses. All the drama in this cloistered, elite community ultimately did little to change their circumstances. News reports of terrifying natural disasters and the rolling back of diversity initiatives are background music for an upper class working professional meeting up with a former associate. The message is clear: these people get to float above the ugliness that the rest of us have to suffer through. What is hell on earth for us is something to watch disappear in the rearview mirror for them.

The specter of Woody Allen, the director accused of raping his adopted daughter and who is married to his former partner’s adopted daughter, hangs above the entire film. This is most obvious in the opening credits that copy the font and jaunty jazz tunes of his films, but also through the near caricature dialogue that never penetrates beyond the most rudimentary level of discourse. The epilogue, where the privileged intellectuals have weathered the storm of this sexual assault controversy and kept all their creature comforts and vaunted status, calls to mind a recent interview Allen gave on Bill Maher’s podcast Club Random. Even as the host vociferously defended the director’s name, invoking terms like “witch hunt”, Allen himself was far more blasé, insisting that he suffered no practical consequences and he was doing just fine. It is this truth that the closing moments of the film clarifies.

Does that justify the meandering, confounding, borderline offensive journey that After the Hunt takes to get there? Not entirely; even this conclusion seems to brush over that wealth cannot bandage the psychological trauma of sexual abuse. It does, however, re-contextualize the film as less a botherist treatise of the #MeToo movement and more a satire of the neoliberal slacktivism of the first Trump term that ultimately got us to a second. Real change will not come from Ivy League campuses, because at the end of the day these people have less at stake than the vast majority of Americans. To them, social change is a shaggy dog story.

After the Hunt is now in theaters.

Rating: 3/5