The dessert tart proffered at a chic faculty party in After the Hunt isn’t simply scrumptious-looking. It’s decadent: rich, flaky, and sophisticated, a conversation piece plated with élan, presented with a flourish. This tart is an objet d’art—a tárt. And indeed, pretty much every element of Luca Guadagnino’s new drama arrives with an implied accent aigu, from the A-list actors to the luxuriously textured cinematography, to the quasi–fairy tale title card informing us off the top, via the Windsor Light Condensed typeface beloved of Woody Allen since the 1970s, that “it happened at Yale.”
“It,” in this case, is an ambiguous and incendiary accusation of sexual harassment from a grad student against a faculty member. The film maps the fallout of the situation, on social media and in wood-paneled rooms. Guadagnino’s setting is the insular world of the Ivy League, an epicenter of rhetorical soft power and all-too-tangible material privilege, where professors publish or perish and balding, middle-aged academics present papers about how “the future of jihad is female.” His subject is the mechanics of the persecution industrial complex, centered on a well-feathered culture vulture reduced to pecking for scraps.
If that last part sounds familiar, that’s fair enough. Here, the second t in tárt is silent. There is an unmistakable (and aspirational) connection between After the Hunt’s protagonist, veteran philosophy professor Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts), and Lydia Tár, the disgraced symphony conductor-slash-apex-sexual-predator embodied by Cate Blanchett in Todd Field’s 2022 melodrama of the same (sur)name. A wryly stylized New Yorker cartoon of a movie, Tár tackled cancel culture head-on—literally, when Lydia bum-rushed one holier-than-thou tormentor in front of a sold-out gala crowd. It’s easy to imagine Roberts reading the plaudits for Blanchett’s malevolent, high-comic tour de force and putting out an APB for a similarly thorny project.
Alma in After the Hunt is a distinguished superstar in her field, seeking tenure and the bulletproof intellectual reputation that goes with it—a plot point that boomerangs nicely back on the casting. Like Blanchett, Roberts has an Oscar, but she lacks her contemporary’s thespian gravitas: her aura of technique, her sense of tenure. Roberts is more commonly perceived as a movie star than a great actress. Hence the palpable and affecting quality of striving in her acting in After the Hunt, with its inklings of an icon playing against type. Here is Erin Brockovich trying to conceal rather than exhume the skeletons in the proverbial closet; America’s Sweetheart skulking around snowy Connecticut clutching a forged prescription and nursing a grudge along with her perforated ulcers. Alma assigns Discipline and Punish; she would never read Eat. Pray. Love.
At the beginning of After the Hunt, Alma is riding high, or at least keeping up appearances. Besides being a formidable thinker and lecturer, she’s also a self-styled department den mother, cool and sexy and accessible, beloved of her colleagues and students. To quote Morrissey—whose songs are used twice—“Alma matters,” too much perhaps, to her fellow instructor Hank (Andrew Garfield) and Ph.D. candidate Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). Hank is fortyish, Maggie in her twenties, and both are united in their worship of Alma even as they lock horns in her living room over questions of ideology and identity politics.
Lean and lanky and given to casually draping himself across chairs and couches, as well as their occupants, Hank could be the evil twin to the milquetoast Harvard undergrad that Garfield played in The Social Network: his know-it-all nerdiness is a tool of seduction. Hank enjoys styling himself as a straw man for the blame-patriarchy crowd; he’d just as soon hand the Zoomers in his midst a match. Maggie, meanwhile, is a promising scholar, neck-deep in an apparently excellent dissertation about “performative discontent.” She knows full well that Yale’s white power brokers are apt to treat her as a mascot and a meal ticket (her parents are donors). She’s the polished apple of Alma’s eye—a thoroughbred teacher’s pet—and reflects the older woman’s anxious, narcissistic gaze back at her: Mirror, mirror on the wall / who’s the wokest prof of all?
There is one more important character: Alma’s husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg)—the baker of the tárt, and a psychiatrist perceptive enough that he can afford to take clients at home on his own schedule. Frederik is used to people falling in desperate, unrequited love with his wife: It’s what he did 30 years ago, for better and for worse. Hank’s shameless, in-your-face flirtations worry him less than Maggie’s combustible mix of ambition and insecurity.
One night, after much talk of Heidegger and Hegel and their various private improprieties—and too many drinks, served open-bar at Alma and Frederik’s expense—Hank and Maggie walk home together through New Haven, en route to a friendly nightcap at the latter’s apartment. The next morning, Maggie shows up at Alma’s place, soaked from the rain and shivering. She reports, through nervous tears, that something went wrong—that Hank, inebriated and insistent, crossed the line. That Maggie won’t say exactly which line was crossed raises alarm bells for Alma, who has her own tricky, age-gap rapport with Hank. That Alma seemingly requires clarification on this point makes Maggie apoplectic, although whether this is out of indignation, disappointment, or anxiety about a lack of corroborating details is hard to say.
Hank’s side of the story is to paint himself as a patsy for a panic-stricken plagiarist trying to cover her butt. Meeting up with Alma, he jokes—humorlessly—about whether she’s got a pitchfork handy. She isn’t amused. Cue the shit show, and the rationalizations from various interested parties; when Alma’s boss (David Leiber) moans that the situation—and his attempt to handle it—is a matter of “optics, not substance,” he’s speaking on behalf of an enervated establishment weary of watching its collective step. The repeated insert shots of characters’ manicured fingers—drumming, flexing, steepled, interlocked in thought—could be a clever director’s way of visualizing a zeitgeist defined by hand-wringing; to his credit, Guadagnino stops short of literally giving them pearls to clutch.
It’s probably reductive to say that After the Hunt, with its meticulously structured screenplay (by Nora Garrett) and scrupulously curated literary and musical allusions—Billie Eilish and Ryuichi Sakamoto, together at last!—is the sort of movie that its egghead characters would have a field day deconstructing. Such are the perils of wearing one’s tastes as a badge of honor, and Guadagnino—an evident workaholic on his third film in two years (following Challengers and Queer)—is the sort of director who knows how to dress for success. From Ari Aster to Celine Song (and all the way up the mountain toward Paul Thomas Anderson), there is a tendency these days for filmmakers to make syllabi (if not fetishes) of their influences. The aforementioned typographical nod to Allen, those choice Morrissey songs, and posters for movies by Pedro Almodóvar and Clint Eastwood layered into the mise-en-scene suggest the work of an apt pupil—or maybe Cliff’s Notes scribbled into the margins to distract from the weakness of the text itself.
The paradox of Guadagnino’s work lies in his desire to elicit glancing, under-the-skin sensations while constantly clarifying (and amplifying) his intentions.Guadagnino is a smart director, sometimes to a fault: His remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria was less of a horror movie than a dissertation on genre, at once almost world-historically gory and weirdly bloodless (he did better riffing on post-Twilight vampire-Y.A. tropes in Bones and All). The paradox of Guadagnino’s work lies in his desire to elicit glancing, under-the-skin sensations while constantly clarifying (and amplifying) his intentions—a refusal of subtlety that serves him better in the pop-multiplex mode of Challengers or the tremulous coming-of-age tropes of Call Me by Your Name than the attempted poeticism of Queer, which buckled under the anxiety of influence (including the influence of William Burroughs himself). The same ambition that compels him to take on charged material may explain why he has rarely—if ever—managed to make something truly discomfiting: He’s turned transgression into its own sort of comfort zone.
“Am I a provocateur?” asked Guadagnino not so rhetorically during a Q and A at this year’s New York Film Festival. “No, I don’t think so.… Do I like to make the audience feel what they’re seeing? Yes, very much.” This is a worthy mandate for any director, but to quote D.H. Lawrence—an iconoclast in his own time who would surely fail any contemporary purity test—one must trust the tale and not the teller. With this in mind, After the Hunt is finally pretty sus. Guadagnino gives us plenty to look at—bustling campus hubs and convincingly lived-in interiors—and shoots his actors reverently, with affection for tics and gestures: Edibiri’s squirrel-eyed nerviness, modulated depending on who else is in the vicinity, is best in show, followed by Stuhlbarg’s hilarious pantomime of passive-aggressive codependency. The film moves nicely, hurtling through revelations like a prestige streaming series on 1.5x speed. But incident isn’t the same as insight, and Guadagnino’s surfaces, while absorbing, don’t conceal much; they can’t when the script is so literal-minded about unveiling motivations. Everybody here is dancing around backstories that add up far too neatly for the movie’s own good. Alma, Hank, and Maggie are complex characters only insofar as their pathologies have been designed to interlock; they’re chess pieces in a movie that conflates a prurient fascination with power games with insight (or empathy) for what’s at stake.
The issue may be less that Guadagnino is a provocateur than that he’s too complacent as a dramatist to really provoke. What he can do is elicit knowing snickers—i.e., the final image, a visual gag that consolidates the film’s cynicism about the possibility of true solidarity in “postracial,” late-capitalist America while doubling obliquely as a shot across Lin-Manuel Miranda’s bow. Such bread crumbs are hardly food for thought, however, and After the Hunt is, at best, an elaborate trifle: one that has its tárt and eats it too.
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