After The Hunt Review
Not one of Guadagino’s finest.
Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) is an adored college professor on track for tenure, living the college professorial dream in a luxe apartment with her psychologist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg). When her star student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses her best friend - or perhaps more than - fellow college and tenure-seeker Henrik (Andrew Garfield) of sexual harassment, she finds herself at a crossroads; one that threatens to expose a dark secret from her own past.
After The Hunt is a needlessly provocative he-said, she-said sexual harassment case that throws nearly every single character into a completely distasteful light. The film actively drives you away from any of these figures, particularly the lead role of Alma Imhoff who is largely detestable by the end of the film.
Julia Roberts does well with the material, particularly compared with Garfield and Edibiri who retreat into caricatures of their worst impulses. But from a plot perspective, this film hinges entirely on a series of unbelievable decisions - who keeps the incriminating evidence of a false accusation taped to the underside of a drawer in their bathroom above the toilet paper being the primary one!
Visually, the film oozes close ups in artsy out of focus, and from a dialogue perspective, it luxuriates in obnoxious intellectualisms that grate from the off. Designed to provoke, seemingly, it does so but in the worst, most obvious ways possible; having you screaming internally in frustration as it mimics right wing talking points against progress and equity, all while trying to make itself more self-important than you for bothering to turn up to the cinema and watch it. This is insufferable viewing of the highest order.
There are brief flashes of enjoyment. Roberts screaming “Shut up, They” at a University protestor is so out of the blue the cinema we were in erupted in laughter, and Stuhlbarg’s performance and character from top to bottom, start to finish, is an absolute joy to watch and sit with, but these things aren’t the main text of the piece - and to give the film too much credence for such a side character would be a mistake.
Ultimately, this is a movie that perhaps had a kernel of an interesting story to it originally in its morally complex considerations, but it gets so muddled in style over substance, helmed by a director completely inappropriate for the piece, that it never becomes anything more than an antagonistic piece of intellectualism. You’ll feel stupider leaving the cinema than you did walking in, even after it beats you over the head with its ‘risque commentary’ by having Woody Allen fonts for the opening and closing credits.
