Luca Guadagnino’s latest film tries to attack our modern morals, but does it say anything new about it all? Here’s our After The Hunt review. Last year, Luca Guadagnino examined love and attraction from two very different viewpoints with Challengers and Queer. Whereas the former was sexy and fun, the latter took a more serious ... After The Hunt review | Can Luca Guadagnino hit the mark again?
Luca Guadagnino’s latest film tries to attack our modern morals, but does it say anything new about it all? Here’s our After The Hunt review.
Last year, Luca Guadagnino examined love and attraction from two very different viewpoints with Challengers and Queer. Whereas the former was sexy and fun, the latter took a more serious route to wondering what it means to forming relationships. Neither film strayed too far from the themes or style of Guadagnino’s previous work, but clearly, the director is keen to try something new.
With After The Hunt, Guadagnino continues his fascination with the complicated attachments we form, but takes a different tone with it. A simplistic way to describe the film would be to label it a #MeToo drama, but Guadagnino is interested in much thornier topics.
Julia Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, a professor who loves attention. As her friend points out, she has a tendency to elevate students who openly worship her, such as Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). When Maggie accuses Alma’s friend and fellow professor Hank (Andrew Garfield) of assault, her loyalties are tested. Who do you believe?
When you put the premise of After The Hunt in such a concise way, it sounds like a study in our own morals, asking us to consider how trust and truth collide in today’s world and whether one affects the other.
If only all of that made an interesting film.
After The Hunt is, for me, Guadagnino’s weakest film in quite some time. There’s a great story to be told here and something to be said about our culture, but Guadagnino feels more interested in creating chaos and controversy just for the sake of it than saying anything of substance.
As it turns out, multiple powerful individual elements don’t make a coherent whole.
After The Hunt keeps stacking motives, backstories and detail into a huge pile of storytelling that is constantly at the risk of falling over. The film works best when it explores privilege and class. Alma lives a lavish, comfortable life, even if her marriage with her husband (Michael Stuhlbarg, a particular highlight) is distant but amicable. Her life is easy and requires little effort. If you’re willing to spend over two hours with a character who becomes more and more unlikeable, After The Hunt might work for you where it didn’t for me.
Maggie comes from old money and rents a modest flat with her partner. She puts on an act of being a regular, poor student, but the fact that she can afford Yale alone puts her on a different path in life. So, can we trust her when she says Hank sexually assaulted her, especially as she ultimately didn’t have any samples taken that night that would definitively prove his guilt? Is this simply a new element of the story she’s telling to the world about herself, of the character she’s creating?
I won’t spoil the later revelations here, but from there, After The Hunt keeps getting more and more uncomfortable. Perhaps it wasn’t the purpose, but early in the film Guadagnino seems to ask if, in today’s world, post the #MeToo movement’s rise, we can and should trust women just because they’re women?
Maybe all of this would be worthwhile if Guadagnino or screenwriter Nora Garrett managed to say something insightful about it all. If there was something to be said about these characters, about class, gender, any of it, it’s buried underneath those unlikeable characters. Whisper it: it’s a little bit dull, too. After The Hunt lacks the tenderness of Call Me By Your Name or the sharpness of Suspiria, instead settling on being a muddled attempt at looking at our world as it is now.
After The Hunt shares some DNA with Todd Field’s Tár, which also placed women in the middle of controversy. Tár though delivered a similarly ambigous study in morals, but did it so much more compellingly, asking us timely questions about power and class. Roberts, Edebiri and Garfield are all on fine form, but are drowned out here.
Whereas the director’s previous films were overflowing with energy and life, After The Hunt feels akin to a particularly dry slice of cake. It looks good, has all the ingredients to be amazing, but it doesn’t take long to realise it’s a long way from satisfying.
After The Hunt is in cinemas 17th October.
