“The music is one, if not the only element of excess in the film: the dialogue, the lavish New England production design, and the need to tick every Gen Z box make After the Hunt a film to enjoy mostly for the excellent performances, but which turns out to be one of Luca Guadagnino’s lesser efforts.”

Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt can best be described as ‘Great conversations in elegant rooms’ (liberally stolen from, of all things, Game of Thrones). Set among the intelligentsia at Yale University (who, if we have to believe Guadagnino, are a bunch of alcoholics going by the amounts they consume), the film is indeed mostly a series of conversations between members of the philosophy department. These start with erudite discussions over wine about cancel culture, while throwing barbs about getting tenured at two of the professors present, Alma (Julia Roberts) and Hank (Andrew Garfield). The two are close friends. One could even say too close, given the fact that Alma is married to psychologist Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg); a marriage that has seen better times, true, but the flame of love has not been extinguished. Hank is quite tactile in general, also towards a student both Alma and Hank have under their wing, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). Black and lesbian, and the daughter of parents who basically fund half of Yale, she is the teacher’s pet. One night, after another session of heady talk and heavy drink at Alma’s, Hank walks Maggie home.

And that is when the conversations take a darker tone. The next day Maggie doesn’t show up for class, without notice. Alma is both worried and annoyed, until she finds a distraught Maggie on her doorstep, who hesitantly tells her that Hank crossed a line the night before as they were having a last nightcap at her dorm. Alma’s reaction is rather cold, shocked that one of her closest friends could do such a thing. When she confronts Hank he spins a story about Maggie trying to counter his accusation that she is plagiarizing her dissertation. When Maggie takes her story to the school board, Hank is unceremoniously fired. That would have ended the drama, but Maggie decides to go public with her story, and implies that Alma, as a woman, didn’t give her the support she needed, while also making it a story about race.

Guadagnino and writer Nora Garrett touch on some thorny issues in After the Hunt, but are very careful not to prick themselves on the clash between generations when it comes to such matters. They instead let the audience choose sides by letting them project their own views about issues like #MeToo, cancel culture, safe spaces, and inclusivity and diversity onto the actions and words of the characters. Inevitably, these will fall more or less along the same generational fault lines as they do in the film. “Whatever happened to burying it all inside and developing a compulsive habit in your 30s,” sighs Kim (Chloë Sevigny), the school’s psychologist and a close friend of Alma’s, in what is probably a succinct distillation of a good deal of her generation’s approach to issues like sexual harassment. Bottle it up, and keep going. Maggie on the other hand represents a generation that has a self-centered view of the world and will cry wolf at the slightest hint of injustice. The bottom line is that the sexual predator is punished, but nobody is 100% satisfied with the outcome, which will eventually lead to a rift between Alma and Maggie. The film neatly removes the last shreds of doubt about Hank being a sexual predator through a late altercation between Alma and Hank, although his hand on Maggie’s knee in the opening scene already hints at him being a little too comfortable with physical contact around women.

Elsewhere, the film dances around the issues and lets the characters take a stab at resolving them through prickly conversations, without much success. It is hard to choose sides in this debate when most characters are hypocritical, flawed human beings (as are we all, probably), and by the end pretty much all unlikable. Comparisons will inevitably be made with Todd Field’s Tár, but the key difference is that the protagonist in that film was the sexual predator, while in After the Hunt Alma is caught between her loyalties to a student whose parents are buying her her academic credentials and a close friend who is the predator. Roberts navigates this minefield with steely determination in a performance that is at its best when the actress has no dialogue. A scene of her dressing down a student who dares to weave today’s social issues into a philosophical debate, reminiscent of Cate Blanchett’s ripping a young man a new one during one of her masterclasses, is impressive but lacks the bite that Blanchett could bring to it through Field’s writing. The emotional damage on Roberts’ face in some of the quieter scenes is where she shines, however. Opposite her, Garfield uses his boyish charm and a smile that comes too easily to render a smarmy man who is just as entitled as the students he accuses, and is almost instantly unlikable. Edebiri fares worse, mostly because her character is written as a string of Gen Z clichés, down to her relationship with a non-binary character (Lio Mehiel); Maggie feels less like a character than the others, and Edebiri has trouble getting her through the latter stages of the film in which Maggie and Alma become pitted against each other. Outside of the main trio, Michael Stuhlbarg puts in a fine performance as Alma’s husband, stuck in a sexless marriage between two people growing old together, although even he has an altercation with Maggie that belies the nature of his character.

The writing is spotty and erratic in general. The way it handles its main themes seems to suggest Garrett entered the chat a few years late and with little notion of Maggie’s generation. She also feels the need to include a mystery subplot that has ties to a secret in Alma’s past and its relevance is only revealed very late in the film, and in a rather clunky manner. Likewise, Alma suffers from an ailment that has her wince in pain or throw up in the faculty bathroom from time to time, but it turns out to be a rather banal predicament that seems to argue that bottling it all up is not the healthy approach. The biggest culprit for After the Hunt being a bit of a mess is Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score. Although it lives up to their usual high standards, the music is so loud in the mix that it is often hard to concentrate on the dialogue, and it becomes an overbearing presence in the film, with an irritating (and rather cliché) metronome click being a particularly annoying factor. The music is one, if not the only element of excess in the film: the dialogue, the lavish New England production design, and the need to tick every Gen Z box make After the Hunt a film to enjoy mostly for the excellent performances, but which turns out to be one of Luca Guadagnino’s lesser efforts.