After the Hunt – Film (2025)

Alma Himoff teaches philosophy at Yale University, where he is about to obtain the long-awaited professorship. She is respected by everyone, in particular the assistant Hank and the doctoral student Maggie, who compete for her attention by throwing mutual digs: the forty-year-old Hank defines the twenty-year-old Maggie as rigid as her entire generation, and the girl invites him not to… generalize. Every now and then Alma doubles over in pain, but doesn’t mention it to her husband Frederick, who looks after her lovingly but defines her as impenetrable, not to say insensitive. When Maggie shows up at the teacher’s house telling her that she has been molested by Hank, Alma finds herself between two fires; on the one hand the empathy towards the student and her reputation as a champion of women, on the other the desire to give her assistant the benefit of the doubt. A metronome ticks, marking the karmic imminence of the destinies of this handful of human beings in the era of #metoo and political correctness.

Luca Guadagnino, always attentive to the laws of desire, tells the story through the screenplay of After the Hunt (signed by the young author Nora Garrett) a world in which “no one is free to follow their impulses without fear of being reprimanded”.

A ruthless universe draconianly split between opposites, in the binary radicalization of contemporary society – freedom of action and public and private responsibility; plurality of information and cultural superficiality; restorative justice and revenge; correctness and legitimacy. The climate in American universities shown by Guadagnino is a minefield in which everyone risks slipping by saying the wrong thing or adopting questionable behavior. Ambiguity is the hallmark of Guadagnino’s cinema, and characterizes both this story and each of its characters. So Alma appears upright but has a secret to hide; Maggie is fragile but also intrusive and manipulative (which in itself does not make her testimony any less valid); Hank is arrogant but also poses as a victim as a straight, cisgender white male; and Frederick is nurturing but also passive-aggressive towards his wife. Everyone is walking on eggshells, yet everyone seems to ignore the obvious consequences of their impulsive acts, which seem to have been committed on purpose to break the surface of correctness imposed by contemporaneity, following an internal compulsion to get caught in the act. And Guadagnino courageously shines a spotlight on an uncomfortable and divisive topic by agreeing to show its shadows.

The characters of After the Hunt they move on the uncertain ridge between truth and perception, everyone feels uncomfortable in the era in which it is thought that being kept at ease is a right, and in which the youngest refuse to bite the bullet as previous generations did (often demonstrating more character). Guadagnino never goes too far in defining what is right and what is not, he does not even reveal what is true, false or simply plausible, leaving us with many questions and very few answers. The director still manages this incandescent material with a certain awkwardness and risks excessive verbosity, but he doesn’t hold back from throwing himself into it in real time. And what seems clear is that a society “built on exact classifications” is not his idea of ​​paradise. Julia Roberts in the role of Alma Imhoff moves with decreasing confidence through a house full of shadows, but it is Ayo Edebiri (Maggie) who best embodies the enigmatic nature dear to the director. Andrew Garfield plays the somewhat stinging role of Hank, who rebels against the loss of that atavistic privilege denied to him by modernity. The dialogues between them are matches of mutual jabs, underlined by music (again by the duo Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross) sometimes Hitchcockian, sometimes simply discordant, to underline the cacophony between the opposing visions of contemporary reality. More than a moral tale, After the Hunt it is a spread of cards that invites spectators to pick up the ones most relevant to them, not necessarily choosing which side to be on. And it avoids (to a large extent) the danger of delegitimizing women who report abuse by calling men to take charge of their aggressive behavior and the disparity in their position of power.
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