Julia Roberts, protagonista in After The Hunt. After the hunt by Luca Guadagnino (in cinemas).

YALE UNIVERSITY LIFE is shocked by a case of alleged rape by a professor on a student... Luca Guadagnino is inspired by a true news story to tell the contemporaneity and its derivatives.

Real or alleged sexual violence, psychological abuse, mixture of true and false. Julia Roberts at her best dramatic performance. Despite some fragilities, for us it is the most interesting film in theaters this weekend.

Yale University, faculty of philosophy. Professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) throws a party in the apartment where he lives with the Marito Fredrik (Michael Stuhlbarg). Among the guests there are Hank (Andrew Garfield), Alma's colleague and dear friendand the young woman fork of Maggie, Ay Edebiri, Ayo Edbiri). Hank and Maggie will be the last to leave the party. Alma sees them walking away together through the house's peephole. The next day the student claims she was raped by the professor after a last glass drunk at her house. Hank says the girl is lying. Meanwhile Alma has excruciating pain in her stomach, she often vomits food and steals drug prescriptions to the faculty doctor, Kim Sayers (Chloë Sevigny)…

The sound of a amplified ticking at the extreme it marks the first scene of the daily routine of Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), a fascinating philosophy professor. From waking up to returning home to her husband. That ticking will recur again in some subsequent sequences. Like the refrain of a perceivable discomfort. It is the whole part of a distressing and disturbing routine, at least as much as theexceptionality of a fact of violence (real or just presumed)…

The aesthetic and cinematic strength of After the Hunt is undeniable, as is his formally impeccable ability to immerse ourselves in a reality that is only geographically distant. Luca Guadagnino's new film manages to tell the story well contemporary youth and their difficulty in communicating with adults.

The duration is excessive and not everything is effective (the screenplay is full of philosophical quotes, too many digressions, the Brechtian estrangement in the last audible bar). Julia Roberts, however, gives her best dramatic performance and the atmospheres from existential thriller they are truly evocative.

After the Hunt it is at times powerful and manages to be "incorrect" when it focuses on certain drifts of postmodern thought (mixture of true/false, pronouns to define us). The title of the film (in Italian After the hunt) is inspired by a quote from Prussian “iron chancellor” Otto von Bismarck: «People never lie as much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election!».

Andrew Garfield e Julia Roberts

Also worth seeing I am love (2010, available on DVD Dolmen) and the series We Are Who We Are (2020, NOW) by Luca Guadagnino. Also to be recovered Crimes and misdemeanors by Woody Allen (1989, on DVD import), The color of lies di Claude Chabrol (1999, Amazon Prime Video e IWonderFull), The accusation by Yvan Attal (2021, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Rakuten TV and TIMVision), The Belle Steiner case di Benoit Jacquot (2024, Apple Tv, Amazon Prime Video).