Quest-en-Scène: After the Hunt is an Underdeveloped Disaster
When I first heard about After the Hunt, I was beyond excited. It seemed like it was scientifically created in a lab to fit my interests, I've loved Luca Guadagnino’s past few films and Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield are two of my favorite actors. Nothing could go wrong, right? Right?
After the Hunt is centered around Alma (played by Julia Roberts), a philosophy professor competing for tenure against her longtime colleague and friend, the gregarious and off-color Hank (played by Andrew Garfield). Her life is upended when her PhD student, Maggie (played by Ayo Edebiri), accuses Hank of sexually assaulting her. In return, Hank claims that Maggie is lying, inventing a story to get him fired after he caught her plagiarizing elements of her dissertation. Throughout the film, Alma struggles with what to believe and who to support, making increasingly rash decisions as the situation rapidly spirals out of control. This sounds like an interesting setup for a film. It covers a complex topic from many different angles and has potential for compelling social commentary and tense, nail-biting moments. However, the film ultimately fails due to a weak script and tonal confusion.
Quickly, let’s get my positive opinions out of the way. This film looks very good, the production design is beautiful, and the cinematography works well; intense closeups on the actors' faces help give many scenes a claustrophobic feel. In combination with the anxiety-inducing score, the cinematography does a great job at building tension during key moments. Julia Roberts delivers the highlight performance. As the protagonist of the film,Roberts can show off her acting chops in a way she hasn’t been able to in many years. Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri do their best with what they have to work with, but ultimately they are fighting a losing battle against the biggest issue with the film: poor character writing.
After the Hunt bills itself as a complex narrative about three flawed people who are all in the wrong to some degree, trapped in a difficult situation that brings out the worst in them. However, the film doesn’t develop the three central characters equally, which leaves the narrative seemingly biased in Hank and Alma’s favor. Both of them are clearly defined as characters prior to the inciting incident and a lot of time is dedicated to explaining their motivations and reasons for acting the way they do. I wouldn’t call them complex characters, but they at least feel like people.
In comparison, Maggie is opaque. Most of the details the viewer knows about her are told by the other characters in order to weaken the credibility of her testimony: she’s a poor student, she plagiarizes, and she uses her family's power as wealthy donors to the college to get her way. The central tension of the film relies on the audience’s uncertainty about whether or not Maggie is telling the truth about what happened to her. As such, it makes sense to shroud her in mystery to some degree to allow the viewers to draw their own conclusions based on the limited information they have and the conflicting accounts Alma is receiving. However, this doesn’t work, as we never learn anything significant about Maggie beyond her potential victimhood and how other characters perceive her. She is never given the chance to either validate or refute other people’s claims about her, let alone establish herself as a character with personality and a life outside of the context of the film’s conflict. She feels hollow, not a person but rather a vessel for the screenwriter to critique what they perceive to be the annoying qualities of young left-leaning people. Her dialogue is nothing but self-righteous, overly politically correct buzzwords, making her feel like a strawman for her smug professors to pelt with tired jokes about “safe spaces” and complaints that Gen Z is too obsessed with their own personal comfort. She is villainized throughout to a degree that even Hank, her almost comically malicious alleged assaulter, never is. Overall, the film’s commentary on sexual assault allegations feels underdeveloped and mean-spirited.
In addition to the poor character writing, the film feels tonally confused. It’s marketed as a psychological thriller, but it never reaches a point of dramatic tension that would truly earn that title. There is a level of detachment present throughout, the lack of depth present in both the characters and the exploration of the central themes prevent any sort of interesting tension from building. As I watched the film, still wanting to give it the benefit of the doubt, I wondered if the lack of dimensionality was purposeful and the film was going to lean into a more satirical tone. This could have worked if the characters and events of the story were pushed just a bit farther into the realm of absurdity; there could have been some interesting commentary on the way people twist themselves into knots and reveal their true colors whilst trying to navigate serious abuse allegations. Instead, the film takes itself painfully seriously and is filled to the brim with overly on-the-nose philosophical jargon about the nature of morality and social shaming, relishing in its own perceived intelligence every time yet another agonizingly pretentious line is delivered completely straight-faced. By the final thirty minutes, I was begging for the film to be over, wanting to free myself from this nightmare I had subjected myself to.
Needless to say, I hated this film and do not recommend it in the slightest. It was muddled and half-baked, with nothing new or interesting to say about its subject matter. Instead, the film chose to spend the majority of its runtime patting itself on the back every time one of the characters mocked a twenty-something college student for being “too woke.” Luca Guadagnino, I love your films, but it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Maybe take this as a lesson to not release three films in two years….