Reviewed on 29th August at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival – Out of Competition, 139 Mins.
Cast: Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri, Chloë Sevigny, Michael Stuhlbarg
Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Director: Luca Guadagnino
In Irish Cinemas: 17th October 2025
Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt tries hard to spark outrage, but instead lands with the weary thud of a conversation that’s already been had too many times. The film’s premise sounds timely on paper: Julia Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, a tenured Yale philosophy professor whose career teeters on collapse after a student accuses a colleague of assault. What unfolds is a tangled, self-serious campus drama straining to be dangerous, but mostly feels like déjà vu from the post-#MeToo playbook.
The title itself invites questions the film can’t answer. What hunt, exactly, and who’s doing the hunting? The only concrete “after” we get is a hasty five-year-later epilogue. This narrative shortcut scrambles the fates of its central women, Alma and her bright, volatile PhD student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), with no connective tissue. By then, the viewer feels left out of an unseen, and far more interesting, story.
Back at the beginning, though, After the Hunt promises something sharper. From the shrill ticking-clock motif that opens Alma’s morning routine with her husband Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg), to the cheeky use of Woody Allen–style title fonts, Guadagnino sets the stage for provocation. The tagline insists, “Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable,” and the director clearly takes that to heart. Even baby pandas would seem menacing under Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s metallic, throbbing score. Yet for all the noise, the film never truly unsettles. Its long, boozy opening party, all expensive furniture and people sprawled like Roman nobles, feels more like a drawing-room mystery than a moral battlefield. (Spoiler: the killer turns out to be “wokeism,” armed with a dog-eared copy of Foucault for Beginners.)
Alma, the department’s icy superstar, and her colleague-slash-rival Hank (Andrew Garfield) are competing for a prestigious post. Her ally Kim (Chloë Sevigny, underused but magnetic) and her student, Maggie, believe Alma deserves it. But the screenplay by Nora Garrett mistakes verbosity for intellect: everyone speaks in perfectly formed epigrams that say little or nothing. When Maggie wanders off during Alma’s soirée and stumbles upon a mysterious envelope linked to Alma’s past, it seems like the discovery will matter. It doesn’t.
Soon after, Maggie shows up at Alma’s doorstep, distraught and claiming Hank assaulted her. Alma’s conflicted response —scepticism, fear, and calculation —threatens her career no matter which side she takes. The story aims to dissect the optics of belief and betrayal, but it mostly rehashes TÁR’s thematic bones without its brutal precision.
Roberts commits admirably, dimming her usual warmth to play Alma as brittle, brilliant, and self-protective. The film bends around her, contorting other characters into strange psychological knots to give her a new emotional note to hit. Stuhlbarg, an actor of quiet depth, is wasted as her neurotic husband, condemned to gesticulate on the margins like a ghost of moral support.
Edebiri, one of the most dynamic performers of her generation, fares no better. Maggie’s characterisation feels like a think-piece masquerading as a person: she’s rich but also queer, Black, and dating a trans partner, yet none of these details inform her behaviour. Instead, she functions as a vessel for older writers’ bafflement toward Gen Z, an avatar of every perceived contradiction the film doesn’t understand.
By the time the credits roll, After the Hunt hasn’t said anything new about academia, feminism, or power. It wants to be incendiary but feels oddly nostalgic for outrage itself, a relic of a moment that’s already passed. For a film about philosophy, it’s remarkably incurious about its own ideas.
Overall: 6.5/10
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