The first and, so far, only time I met Luca Guadagnino was in 2022. We were discussing the way his characters’ sexuality is often muddy and hard to define—an elusiveness that binds his most interesting protagonists. “Do you believe when people tell you ‘I am this thing’, that that’s what they are?” he had said. I said yes. He disagreed. Of the idea of queerbaiting, at the time discussed in the context of his cannibal heartthrob played by Timothée Chalamet in Bones and All: “Opportunistic behavior isn’t part of one specific group of people. Everyone is opportunistic somehow.”
This conversation came to mind when watching his latest film After the Hunt, based on a script by first time screenwriter, Nora Garrett. Gathering his starriest cast yet, amongst them Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Chloë Sevigny, it’s a campus movie about the knotty nature of one-size-fits-all morality, and how what people want might get in the way of what is right. It’s also, as is Luca’s way, full of slippery characters.
The film takes place at Yale in the recent past. Alma Ihmoff, a steel-faced philosophy professor played by Roberts, and the smart, but squirm-inducing Hank Gibson, played by Garfield, are lounging at an after-hours dinner party with some colleagues and students. They’re both up for tenure and contemplate what might happen to their dynamic should one get it over the other. Their gay PhD student Maggie, played by Edibiri, watches on, and they gush over the excellence of her dissertation, Hank grasping her lower thigh in admiration. Later, Hank and Maggie walk home drunk.
By this point, we know what’s happening: Maggie shows up shaken at Alma’s door the next day, and tells Alma that Hank had been forceful with her the night before, and had assaulted her. Alma has questions Maggie can’t answer, and thus everyone’s lives start to unravel—first in secret, then very publicly.
Therein lies the “opportunism” Guadagnino is interested in, and over the course of nearly two hours and twenty minutes, he starts scratching at these characters’ motivations. Yes, it’s a #MeToo movie, and one that deals astutely with those themes, but it’s also a remarkable film about existing in an impious world, where lies—little or big—shape our daily lives. When Alma stands by Maggie, is she doing so because she believes her, or because it’s her opportunity to take Hank off the table for tenure? Or is it because she’s trying to hide the spark of a romantic relationship with him that is making her subservient husband Frederik (an excellent Michael Stuhlbarg) jealous? When Hank says he’s innocent, forcefully, calling Maggie a “bitch” and claiming her dissertation is actually plagiarized, is he trying to backtrack on his own actions? And is Maggie, whose dissertation subject is virtue ethics, and who herself is the daughter of two of the college’s major donors, finding holes in her professor’s lives in order to position herself as her own dream subject?
This sense of conflict shapes it. What might piss off plenty of viewers of After the Hunt: an older generation skewering the younger for their politics, and their way of viewing the world. “I found myself in the business of optics, not substance,” the college’s Dean of Humanities says. In one scene, as Kim, the college doctor played by Sevigny, and Alma, go to a local college bar, The Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” blasts from the jukebox. They gawk at the idea of a band with a “cancelled” frontman being welcomed in a space occupied by young, switched-on millennials. Alma frequently misgenders Maggie’s non-binary partner; there’s a general air of the students’ collective leftist political views, their staunch stance on issues of gender and race, doing more harm than good. Does the film play out in a way that takes sides in that? Figuring that out is part of its pleasure.
Guadagnino is a master of romance against the odds, but After the Hunt is easily one of his most sterile and unfeeling films since he started. That’s not a bad thing: It works because the film is a slow, talky autopsy, withholding the truth from everyone until it reaches a specific, unavoidable point of impact. We spend much of it swirling in that sinkhole of vagueness: Is Maggie lying? Is Hank? Who does Alma really believe?
You should know by now this is no Call Me by Your Name— some will fall for its prickliness; others might find it offensive. Either way it’s a confronting, chilly, and nuanced take on the American campus movie with lots to chew on.
‘After the Hunt’ will be released on November 10.