Julia Roberts leads hot button campus drama

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Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri fill out Luca Guadagnino’s cancel culture exploration.

There’s a very pointed choice made in the opening credits of Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” that is either a tribute, a provocation, or a little bit of both, as the sequence — stark black background, white type font, cast listed in alphabetical order, soft jazz in the background — is styled exactly after a Woody Allen title sequence.

If this were 15 years ago, no big deal. But Allen has been essentially removed — or canceled, in the parlance of our times — from movie culture, to the point where there was even handwringing online over whether or not it was OK to watch “Annie Hall” in the wake of the death of actress Diane Keaton.

So Guadagnino — a titillating filmmaker and habitual button pusher, making his fourth film in four years — is knowingly stepping into these waters, essentially triggering viewers, or at least getting them thinking about cancel culture and its larger implications, and that’s before the movie even starts. It’s not a bad trick, and it sets the stage for what is to follow.

“After the Hunt” takes on a number of thorny issues, including, yes, cancel culture, the mere mention of which is enough to make many people roll their eyes. It’s set on Yale’s campus — “it happened at Yale” is the film’s overly blunt introductory declaration — and concerns allegations of sexual misconduct between a student and a professor, alongside other issues of class, privilege, race, sex, academia, the media, #metoo, virtue ethics and safe spaces, a veritable stew of of hot button topics.

Julia Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, a spiky professor — she’s not turning on the 1,000-watt Julia Roberts charm in this one — who is nonetheless well-liked by her students. Andrew Garfield is Hank Gibson, her colleague, who is accused of sexual assault by Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), a Ph.D. student.

“After the Hunt” isn’t so much a “he said, she said” situation, because there’s a lot more at play in actress-screenwriter Nora Garrett’s screenplay. Maggie’s parents are prominent donors to the university, so her accusation carries heft beyond just the alleged incident itself. Maggie had also been accused of plagiarism by Hank, and he claims she made up the accusations in order to get back at him.

So yeah, thorny stuff. Guadagnino regular Michael Stuhlbarg, meanwhile, plays Alma’s husband, a psychiatrist, who has his own take on everything that is happening. (He thinks Maggie is in love with Alma.) Like everyone in the film, his demeanor is off-putting and unpleasant, and it’s another one of Guadagnino’s tricks that he takes such a likable cast of actors and zaps them of their natural charm, using them as pieces in his modern political play. (It takes a lot to make Andrew Garfield repugnant, but Guadagnino does so here.)

The filmmaker, 54, fixes his eye on close-ups of hands and faces, while a ticking clock plays like a time bomb over the soundtrack. “After the Hunt” never quite detonates, but it causes its share of fallout and leaves viewers with plenty to talk about while sifting through the rubble.

agraham@detroitnews.com

‘After the Hunt’

GRADE: B

Rated R: for language and some sexual content

Running time: 139 minutes

In theaters