"After the Hunt" is About Everything and Nothing...On Purpose?

I can totally understand why someone may at first glance brush off Luca Guadagnino's After The Hunt, or even find it insufferable. From the moment the trailer dropped, it was rife with odd camera angles, actors reading pretentious dialogue, and a literal ticking clock of a score that feels like it should be in the new Blumhouse horror flick. Considering that I saw the film much later than everybody else did, I was fully expecting to be just as, if not more annoyed by the whole thing. But I ended up getting way more out of After The Hunt than I could've ever anticipated. 

In After The Hunt, Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) and Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) are coworkers at Yale, where a star student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses Gibson of sexual assault. After confiding in Alma, Maggie is unsatisfied, igniting a silent free-for-all war. 

Before I headed for my screening my Mom asked me who was in the film, and when I mentioned Julia Roberts’ name, her response was “oh that’s nice. She hasn’t done much in a while.” I hadn’t really given this much thought since I grew up in the first years post-global Julia Roberts fever, but when she said that I realized that’s actually kind of true. It’s a shame that this film is getting such mixed to negative reactions for quite a few reasons, but not the least of which is that this is Roberts’ best performance in a really long time. Alma Imhoff is a character that presents a different side to her in nearly every scene. She’s gotten by in life by being a chameleon in every environment she is inserted into. The script is strategic about when to reveal backstory about her, but eagle eyed viewers will be able to catch on to early cues based on her non-verbal performance alone. 

Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri are equally as great, and more than hold their own in roles that ask quite a lot from them. But the performance who I find returning to the most in my head is Michael Stuhlbarg as Alma's husband, Frederik. He is chewing the scenery on a level here that, regardless of your thoughts on the film, is undeniably admirable, and largely fascinating. He is having the most fun out of anyone here, and it shows. 

The cinematography and cutting of the film have already become a large topic of conversation online and elsewhere, and it’s not hard to see why. The camera is often placed at strange, often uncanny and uncomfortable angles, and the editing can be jarring, but not in the way you may think. There is clearly efficient coverage of every scene, but the film makes a conscious effort to cut to the most unexpected angles almost every time. Nearly every element to the film is designed to provoke you, or make you uncomfortable, and we’ll get into the ethics of that, as well as the lack of subtlety on that in a bit, but just to be perfectly clear to those who may be confused: yes it looks and is cut that way on purpose.

There is one visual motif involving wedding rings, and the ways in which characters interact with their hands that I found to be startlingly moving, especially considering how the story concludes. 

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross continue their collaboration with Guadagnino in the composing suite, and deliver a shockingly engaging score, even by their standards. The soundtrack's merit seems to be the one thing that not even haters of the film can deny. The same goes for their work in this year's disappointing legacy sequel Tron: Ares. It truly seems like this duo can do no wrong. 

There has already been a ton of chatter about how it seems like all of the praise in recent years seems to have finally gone to Luca Guadagnino’s head. This film feels so committed to saying so much about so many topics, that it winds up reducing its commentary to the most elementary of levels, and winds up saying close to nothing at all. And I hate to be a “that’s the point” guy, because I think that there are quite a few things I think the film is getting at pretty effectively that people are missing but also…that’s kind of the point. 

People seem to be writing this off as a rudimentary, misguided MeToo/Gen Z takedown, but similarly to Eddington this year, it’s been quite intriguing to see people directing their distaste in a film’s commentary towards the topics that the film is actually most lenient towards. Everyone in this film is kind of deplorable, but it’s clear that the ones who are least so are the daddy’s money, academically fraudulent, entitled university students. Because who set the systems up to get them there? Aside from that, I think After the Hunt has quite a bit to say on the topic of loyalty, and how many times in a person’s life this trait can legitimately be tested. And once we either pass or fail that test, how our minds and bodies respond over time. This is far more substantive to me than the “everyone sucks, so by proxy the film is saying nothing” narrative. It’s certainly overwritten, overstuffed, and often over-performative… but then again, so are most of us.