In cinemas; Cert 15A

After The Hunt | Official Trailer

Prolific, provocative and walking a line between highbrow and lurid, Italian auteur Luca ­Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Challengers) turns his ­attention to #MeToo with this campus rape-accusation drama.

An awards-worthy Julia Roberts spars with a merely excellent Andrew Garfield as Alma and Hank, charismatic philosophy teachers at Yale. Alma’s devoted husband Fred (Michael Stuhlbarg) appears to tolerate the pair’s close friendship, but Alma has another admirer circling.

Her student Maggie (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri) has a crush on the doting professor and when she comes to Alma the morning after a party claiming she was assaulted by Hank, Alma wonders might there be a little more to it.

But nothing is simple in writer Nora Garrett’s riveting, elegant and difficult psychological thriller that resists boiling a serious theme down to neat binaries.

Stuck between a career rock and a moralistic hard place, Alma emerges as having a skeleton or two in her own cupboard. Music (including a Hitchcockian score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) and prying camera angles keep us on edge, as the generation gap ­becomes a treacherous space.

Four stars