Dial down the Oscar buzz. Even a stellar cast giving it full welly can’t save Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt from choking on its own self-importance. It’s actually impressive that the director behind films as sexy, fun and freaky as Call Me By Your Name, Challengers, and Bones and All could waste all this talent on this slog of a movie.
After the Hunt is a college campus drama from a bygone era, when discussions about race, class and rape were the stuff of lurid Rolling Stone articles. “It happened at Yale” the title card pompously informs us, although most Ivy Leagues these days are more concerned with dodging Donald Trump’s ire than intergenerational warfare between Boomer staff and Zoomer students.
Julia Roberts is glacial professor Alma, although she’s more rotten ice than frozen lake. She’s clawed her way almost to the top and is just waiting for tenure, alongside her sleazy younger department colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield with his shirt permanently unbuttoned practically to his navel). She insists to her longsuffering and frankly adorable psychoanalyst husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg with a lovely beard) that they’re just friends, but they give off a wildly indiscreet vibe of a couple who have had, are currently having, or at least tiptoe right up to the edge of an affair. Poor Frank, meanwhile, hasn’t had conjugal pleasures for months.
These louche academics lounge around in gorgeous grace-and-favour faculty apartments where they throw boozy parties, put their feet on all the plush furniture and smoke cigarettes indoors like heathens. Alma loves to be hankered after, so on top of Hank and Frederik she’s elevated Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), to teacher’s pet. But Maggie may be simply a middling student with rich donor parents who has developed an unnerving habit of dressing like Alma in public, down to her crisp white trousers cropped at the ankle, dangly chain pendants and short black painted nails.
In case the audience is to dumb to notice the subtext, Chloë Sevigny is pressganged into the role of psychologist Dr Kim Sayers, who decodes Maggie’s Elektra complex for Alma and any thickos watching in the cinema who have never taken Freud 101. Maggie, a lesbian dating nonbinary law student Alex (Lío Mehiel), probably fancies her much older professor and also hates her. She’s trying to do a Single White Female, except she’s black. Also all Gen Z students are terrible pampered posers who want to cosplay as poor in grotty apartments and date people whose gender presentation suits their Woke Agenda while plotting their next protest. The grown-ups, meanwhile, prefer to stuff down their trauma and develop unhealthy coping mechanisms.
All of this gets terribly complicated when Maggie accuses Hank of sexually assaulting her after a party at Alma’s. Hank maintains Maggie is seeking revenge for his insinuation she’s plagiarised her thesis. Guitadagnino seems to think it’s a knotty ethical dilemma, although we know Hank has means, motive and opportunity. As Alma herself crisply informs him, it’s idiotic to go back to a student’s home and drink with them. Although she probably wasn’t thinking about throwing him under the bus for the tenure track race until she is humiliated by him flirting with a waitress at his favourite Indian restaurant.
Complicating matters further is Maggie’s discovery of Alma’s poorly hidden envelope of Terrible Tragic Backstory. And Alma’s mysterious ailment that has her throwing up in every available toilet (her crisp white trousers miraculously never besmirched by kneeling on endless bathroom floors) while jonesing for prescription pills. All of this is laid out within the first 20 minutes or so, then circled back over and over again for another two hours of an indeterminable 139 minute runtime.
The cast are troopers. Roberts is fabulous as the evil twin to her seminal teacher role in Mona Lisa Smile. Edebiri can do things with her face that make me desperate to see her in a proper thriller. Characters are reflected in mirrors during key conversations and there’s a lot of foreshadowing about the Panopticon that feints at depth. But they are paper thin, mean-spirited caricatures that aren’t even enjoyable in their awfulness. I was begging for it to be over about half an hour before the end. Tellingly, it was the first film I’ve seen at LFF where there was zero applause at the end.
Also, maybe I’m a Zillennial snowflake still in possession of full hearing range, but something is wildly off with the mixing. The background music is horribly loud, rising to excruciating levels when characters are in deliberately noisy settings (a campus bar, or Stuhlbarg as a sulky husband refusing to turn down the volume). I had to put my trusty rave earplugs in midway through and still left with a migraine.
What’s so disappointing is After the Hunt, is exactly how Alma describes Maggie as having the “potential to be brilliant” but with more than a whiff of copycatting about it. We’ve already had a successful career ice maven unraveled by paranoia and past indiscretions via Cate Blanchett’s exquisite turn in Tár. But this isn’t a psychological thriller about power dynamics and their abuse so much as psychological torture.
After the Hunt is in cinemas from October 16
