{"id":185177,"date":"2025-08-29T17:51:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T17:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/185177\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T17:51:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T17:51:10","slug":"julia-roberts-in-a-drama-of-sexual-accusation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/185177\/","title":{"rendered":"Julia Roberts in a Drama of Sexual Accusation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLuca Guadagnino<\/a>\u2019s \u201cAfter the Hunt<\/a>,\u201d a drama of sexual accusation and academic scheming set within the rarified cloisters of Yale University, is a movie that has some very good acting, an impressively dark and foreboding visual palette, and a psychologically tense atmosphere of mystery and suspense. It\u2019s a movie that taps into current questions of social justice and sexual morality, and it\u2019s willing to come up with answers that cut against the prevailing orthodoxies. Julia Roberts<\/a>, as a grimly ambitious philosophy professor who has more to say about Michel Foucault than she does about her own (hidden) life, acts with a coldly compelling sardonic spikiness. All of which makes \u201cAfter the Hunt,\u201d if nothing else, an urgent and provocative conversation piece.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the same time, there are many moments in the film \u2014 a scene here, an encounter there \u2014 that are likely to leave viewers scratching their heads, thinking something along the lines of, \u201cWait a minute. What just happened?\u201d And that isn\u2019t the sort of thing you want drifting through your mind when you\u2019re watching a realistic academic soap opera, even one that\u2019s cultivating a certain air of enigma. \u201cAfter the Hunt\u201d has been made with a fair amount of craft and intrigue, but it\u2019s also a weirdly muddled experience \u2014 a tale that\u2019s tense and compelling at times, but dotted with contrivances and too many vague unanswered questions. That\u2019s why, in the end, it\u2019s a less than satisfying movie. Do not expect box-office fireworks.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first sign that Guadagnino is going to be pushing back against aspects of the #MeToo revolution is the opening credits. They\u2019re a direct facsimile of Woody Allen\u2019s fabled credits: the distinctive white Windsor Light font lettering on a black background, the cast listed in alphabetical order, all accompanied by an old jazz standard. When you deliberately mimic the aesthetic of Woody Allen\u2019s credits in a movie that\u2019s going to turn on an issue of sexual accusation, you\u2019re kind of declaring where you come from.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat said, \u201cAfter the Hunt\u201d is not an overtly dogmatic movie. (Maybe covertly.) The film was written by Nora Garrett, an actor making her screenwriting debut, and it\u2019s full of sharply witty and brittle exchanges that effectively conjure the backbiting showboat intellectualized rigor of the academic world. Guadagnino, even though he\u2019s dealing with hot-button issues here, has not made some glorified TV-movie that spells everything out. Quite the contrary: \u201cAfter the Hunt\u201d fills in what\u2019s happening with every character bit by bit, allowing each of them to exist in their own zone of teasing uncertainty. The cinematography, by Malik Hassan Sayeed, has a documentary-like precision combined with a somber stateliness. (Even a dank college bar is shot with visual gravitas.) Early on, there\u2019s a party sequence set in the home of Roberts\u2019 Alma Imhoff, who\u2019s the film\u2019s central character, and for a moment we may think we\u2019re at the Yale Club, because the place looks so damn huge, with high ceilings and long hallways and a giant kitchen.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the characters tweak each other, lobbing \u201cfriendly\u201d putdowns back and forth, we feel like we\u2019re being drawn into a kind of maelstrom, with all sorts of underlying tensions at play. Alma, a popular teacher, is married to Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a bearded psychoanalyst she treats as not nearly as important as she is; he responds by baiting her with emasculated impishness and then skulking off to make cassoulet. It\u2019s no wonder she\u2019d rather flirt with Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield<\/a>), her fellow professor and longtime close friend, who views every conversation he\u2019s in as a cutting form of competition.<\/p>\n

\n\tThese two, however, really are competing. They\u2019re both up for tenure, and there\u2019s some tasty badinage about what will happen to their alliance if only one of them gets it \u2014 and also about whether Alma\u2019s gender will help put her over. (She rejects this idea as the old sexism.) For a while, both profs make a show of fawning over Maggie (Ayo Edebiri<\/a>), a graduate student who is hard at work on her philosophy thesis; Alma is her official mentor (what we used to call a thesis adviser). It all seems chatty and effervescent enough until the party winds down, and Maggie and Hank walk out together. Though we never see what happens, the two wind up going to Maggie\u2019s apartment for a nightcap (her roommate and trans romantic partner is away), and that\u2019s where the film\u2019s pivotal event takes place.<\/p>\n

\n\tA night or two later, Maggie shows up at Alma\u2019s house, distraught, claiming that when they were in the apartment, Hank sexually assaulted her. Alma questions her for a moment, because the man being accused is her close friend, but even her slight skeptical instinct is greeted by Maggie as a potential betrayal. They are both women; it\u2019s core to Maggie that she be believed and supported. At this point, the audience has no clear idea of what actually went on. But then Hank asks Maggie to meet him in his favorite haunt: an Indian restaurant situated in a renovated silver diner. As he wolfs down his tandoori chicken, he tells his version of the story: that Maggie, he discovered, had plagiarized much of her thesis, and that he\u2019d confronted her with this accusation when they were in her apartment, and that she fabricated the story of assault in order to squirm out of being caught for what she did.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are notes of ambiguity in \u201cAfter the Hunt,\u201d but it\u2019s my reading of the film that we\u2019re meant to believe Hank. The audience is cued to understand that he could effectively demonstrate the plagiarism charge, and when Hank talks about how in this situation he has become an instant male-predator clich\u00e9, damned regardless of what he says, I think the film expects us to connect with the righteous rage that Andrew Garfield expresses and to take what he\u2019s saying on the level. At this point, though, we still think we\u2019re going to be watching some sort of he said\/she said procedural played out in an academic setting.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut \u201cAfter the Hunt\u201d is not that kind of movie. Alma has a meeting with the Dean of Humanities, and she tells him that she believes Maggie. It\u2019s clear that she\u2019s lying (and a revelation later in the film about the plagiarism only confirms it), yet the scene is quite strange. She has decided to lie because if she defends Hank in a witch-hunt atmosphere, she feels like she could do herself damage. But Julia Roberts plays it all in a way that\u2019s so emotionally neutral that we hardly register Alma\u2019s treachery \u2014 we don\u2019t feel it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat said, the first thing to happen in \u201cAfter the Hunt\u201d that left me perplexed was when Hank bursts into Alma\u2019s classroom, desperate to talk, and then, in the hallway, he tells her that he was fired. Yes, people are sometimes dropped from a career position after a sexual accusation (notably in the entertainment industry). But as much as \u201cAfter the Hunt\u201d is ramping up an outcry against unfair cancellation, this is still the Ivy League. We\u2019d been told, and would expect, that there would be an investigation and a hearing. But the film wastes no time washing Hank out of the picture.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe hunt, it would seem, is over. The heart of the movie, as its title suggests, takes place after that, and this is where the drama becomes murky, in part because it\u2019s about too many things at once. Alma has a dark secret from her past (one that echoes the film\u2019s central situation), and while that\u2019s fair dramatic game, it\u2019s first hinted at in one of the flimsiest contrivances I\u2019ve seen in a long time, with Maggie using the restroom during that opening party\u2026where she just happens to find\u2026the envelope of evidence\u2026that Alma keeps taped to the ceiling of the toilet-paper closet!<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s more. Alma is racked by spasms of abdominal pain, which cause her to have violent vomiting fits (I think we\u2019re supposed to take this pain as metaphorical), and instead of consulting, you know, a doctor, she\u2019s become a pharmaceutical pain-killer junkie who forges prescriptions from the pad of Dr. Kim Sayers, the school physician who happens to be her pal (she\u2019s charmingly played by Chlo\u00eb Sevigny in the world\u2019s ugliest haircut). We could write this off as a dysfunctional eccentricity, were it not for the fact that a giant plot development hinges on it. It has to do with Alma\u2019s tenure, an issue that was already all twisted up with the sexual accusation.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe more the movie goes on, the more Alma seems a monster of single-minded drive. If \u201cAfter the Hunt\u201d has an obvious cinematic model, it\u2019s \u201cT\u00e1r,\u201d also a kind of predatory mystery in which Cate Blanchett played a star of her own classical world who was a monster of ego. The movie, in the spirit \u201cT\u00e1r,\u201d gets in some pithy slaps at things like gender pronouns and rich-kid privilege; it\u2019s also got a spooky modernist soundtrack (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross). But \u201cT\u00e1r,\u201d which also chafed against the impulse toward cancellation, always kept you in touch with what was going on inside Lydia T\u00e1r. In \u201cAfter the Hunt,\u201d Julia Roberts\u2019 performance is impressively addled \u2014 now soft, now prickly, now saturnine, now lashing out \u2014 but for all that her Alma remains an opaque presence. Too often, the filmmakers don\u2019t clarify what\u2019s going on with her; we have to sort of decipher the situations and piece them together. She\u2019s a character of supreme selfishness who undermines her own interests, and while there\u2019s an abstract explanation for that (it relates to her dark secret), it adds up on paper more than it does as lived-in drama.<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course, maybe the reason that \u201cAfter the Hunt\u201d winds up being oblique to a fault is that on some level the film is working to understate its ideological thrust. On the one hand, it does an effective job of characterizing Maggie as a corrupt paragon of \u201cwoke\u201d values: Ayo Edebiri, with her circumspect smile, plays her as impeccably pious, never more so than when it turns out that Maggie is a rich kid whose parents are Yale\u2019s wealthiest endowment benefactors. Her moral entitlement fuses with her aristocratic entitlement; that\u2019s why she thinks she\u2019s entitled to lie. But as the scandalous secrets of Alma\u2019s past emerge, the film ultimately reveals that it\u2019s going up against the entire ethos of \u201cbelieve all women.\u201d If you\u2019re going to question that aphorism, then surely there\u2019s a way to do it that\u2019s more coherently plausible and less reductive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Luca Guadagnino\u2019s \u201cAfter the Hunt,\u201d a drama of sexual accusation and academic scheming set within the rarified cloisters…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":185178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[47631,47632,26382,171,6667,47633,53,67,132,68,30989],"class_list":{"0":"post-185177","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-after-the-hunt","9":"tag-andrew-garfield","10":"tag-ayo-edebiri","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-julia-roberts","13":"tag-luca-guadagnino","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-venice-film-festival"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}