After the Hunt
With the critical and commercial success of Challengers and the under-discussed but equally excellent adaptation of William S Burroughs’s novel Queer, it’s fair to say 2024 may have been Luca Guadagnino’s year. The same is unlikely to be said of the Italian auteur’s 2025 in the wake of the #MeToo drama, After the Hunt: a visually sumptuous, often engaging but mostly meandering he-said-she-said drama that fails to tap into the socially conscious spark that defined last year’s enthralling run.
Set primarily within the campus of the prestigious Yale University, we follow well-respected Psychology Professor Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts), who, despite being married to shrink Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), is the subject of much amorous attention from her younger colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) and her supposedly brilliant student Maggie Price (Ayo Edebiri). At a party held by Alma and her loving but “vies too hard for her attention” husband, Frederik, we learn that the new-wave of students who protest and vocalise their ideals have the older generation of professors on edge (or, so we are to believe). Hank, a junior professor who is competing with Alma for tenure, is a boisterous character who toes the line between disarmingly charming and criminally inappropriate from the get-go as he eggs on a male PHD student in a misogynistic verbal rant, and flirts mercilessly with all those around him, including the young and favoured Maggie. When Maggie accuses Hank of an assault, she goes to the person she trusts most on campus – her idolised tutor Alma, who, to Maggie’s and our surprise, is less than welcoming of the revelatory accusation.
Where some viewers may have trouble is with the film’s central concept, as the question at the heart of this feature is not whether we believe Maggie, but whether we should believe her. We are hit with volley of reasons to discredit Maggie’s claim as, from the very start, she is depicted as an undeniably untrustworthy character (in the movie’s opening moments, she rifles through Alma’s belongings with some unknown and never quite explained intention other than misguided curiosity) whose millionaire parents fund the University and are the de-facto reason Maggie found a spot at the Ivy League school, and perhaps why, after a bout of blatant plagiarism in her thesis to which Hank discovered, she remains at the College. It’s a jumbled setup that will certainly not land all too comfortably with audiences, particularly in light of the #MeToo era.
Edibiri plays this part well, but pales in the light of a never-better Roberts who lifts the whole storied drama as the conflicted but duplicitous Alma. Equally, Stuhlbarg provides an exceptionally flamboyant depiction of an unloved but well-meaning husband who, despite not having much to do other than cook cassoulets and mock Alma’s students, manages to steal every scene he’s in, and Garfield also provides a suitably slimy but unsettlingly human depiction of a man fighting against the career-breaking consequences of his actions.
Less of a serious misfire and more of a slight misstep, After the Hunt has some compelling moments and genuinely award-nod-worthy performances from its key cast, no more so than its lead Robert’s who provides her best performance of the last ten years, and not to mention is elevated by the expected directorial flair of Gaudagnino’s expert camera movement that’s paired with another well-suited score from the duo of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. But, by the film’s close and following a shaky third act, these elements feel slightly wasted, weighed down by an occasionally engaging but ultimately unrefined script that stretches its central concept too thin and leaves you wishing that you had just replayed Challengers instead.
Ronan Fawsitt
After the Hunt is released on 17th October 2025.
Read more reviews from our London Film Festival coverage here.
For further information about the event visit the London Film Festival website here.
Watch the trailer for After the Hunt here:
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