Luca Guadagnino isn’t searching for provocation. That’s what he claimed at a press conference following a New York Film Festival screening of opening night selection After The Hunt; he thinks provoking people just for the sake of it as “childish” and mostly just wants to engage with the audience. Considering his latest film, this seems plausible. After The Hunt touches upon hot-button issues of a specific culture-war stripe, like cancellation in the world of academia and contemporary gender politics, without getting bogged down in ham-handed satire or Just Asking Questions Cinema. Then again, the movie does open with what audiences of a certain age and sensibility will immediately recognize as the Woody Allen credits font.
Not just the font, either. White-on-black Windsor Light, popping on and off screen, complete with “Starring (in alphabetical order),” only missing a casting director credit for Juliet Taylor. The utility of this pointed homage takes longer to sink in. Allen has made some campus-set comedies, but nothing much like the he-said, she-said drama that fuels After The Hunt. (Allen, especially in his later work, tends more towards he-said, he-said, he-said-some-more.) Guadagnino’s film takes place almost entirely within the Yale bubble, even if it represents the first time London has ever been called upon to credibly impersonate New Haven. After a party thrown by philosophy professor Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts), her prize graduate student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses Alma’s colleague and perhaps suspiciously close friend Hank (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault. What that transgression actually entailed remains off-camera and largely undescribed by Maggie, who doesn’t feel she should have to provide a grim play-by-play when she goes to Alma for help.
The lack of precision about the encounter between Maggie and Hank—they were together at her apartment, that much is agreed upon—is just one of many factors muddying the waters as Maggie, Hank, and Alma weigh their options, obligations, and what to do next. After The Hunt uses some of these factors for later-breaking story turns. But suffice to say that an accusation of plagiarism, Maggie’s identity as a queer Black woman, an undiagnosed medical condition, and the fact that both Alma and Hank are up for tenure all play major parts (among others) in Nora Garrett’s knotty original screenplay.
The various complications initially signal a story predicated on our inability to fully understand an unseen interaction. But After The Hunt isn’t really after a Rashomon-style multi-perspective rumination on the nature of truth. It eventually zeroes in on the more philosophical question of what the characters, particularly Alma and Maggie, actually want, and whether the goals they pursue are capable of curing the dissatisfaction that seems to plague both of them. Maggie is still young enough to plausibly lay some blame on systemic failure; Alma may have developed the self-loathing to blame herself, even as she turns her hostility outward. Roberts is terrific here, retroactively appearing to have gradually lowered her onscreen temperature over the course of the past decade to properly play a woman dominated by her chilly guardedness, even with her doting therapist husband (Michael Stuhlbarg, stealing scenes with wry hand flourishes).
The rest of the performances are good, too, but they often feel secondary to the performance of the movie itself. It’s dominated by Guadagnino’s signature jarring aural and visual ideas, like the moments, including the film’s very first scene, scored by a metronomic ticking that allows only the occasional solo sound source (a single voice or piece of background noise) to bleed through. Once the accusations start to fly, there are frequent (and boldly off-putting) POV shots where Roberts or Garfield will appear to stare straight into the audience’s eyes rather than each other’s, and moments where the camera drifts to focus on characters’ hands, as if searching for a body-language tell. Somehow Guadagnino has coaxed the great cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed away from music videos and documentaries to work on his first fiction feature since 1998, when he shot He Got Game and Belly. After The Hunt’s celluloid cinematography lacks the grainy, palpable grit Sayeed’s ’90s work, but he’s a great match for Guadagnino’s fusion of emotional realism and heightened craftsmanship.
To that end, After The Hunt doesn’t mix and match Hollywood eras with the same spirited beauty as Challengers, which it superficially recalls with its attention to gender politics and star power, and which had the crucial advantage of leaving room for fun. Here, the sheer volume of interconnected backstories, concealed weaknesses, and ambiguous relationships keeps thickening, threatening to overmix the movie into narrative murk even as the images maintain more textured shadows. A need to stay ambiguous—not necessarily some greater unknowability, but simple ambiguity—limits how much we can truly see of Hank and Maggie. The latter in particular gets just enough scenes on her own to make her seem a smidge underdeveloped, rather than intentionally elusive.
The movie’s ambiguities also fudge some minor details. For example, if Maggie is so accomplished and well-established, how is she only now competing for tenure, and with a man at least a decade her junior? (In reality, Garfield is 15 years younger, but let’s allow that the actors may not be playing their real-life ages.) If the implication is that as a woman, she’s had to work longer and harder for it than Hank, it’s only lightly made (and ignores Alma’s supposedly towering status on campus). Plus, Hank’s age is a little wonky, too; he seems a little young to be finger-pointing about the judgmental and oversensitive morality of Gen Z. In a way, After The Hunt would make more intuitive sense with Alma and Hank’s ages swapped, or at least averaged out.
Yet After The Hunt does eventually add up to something greater than its flood of but-what-about details. To categorize it as a “cancel culture” drama would be to mistake some characters’ opinions for the filmmakers sounding off, and Guadagnino doesn’t seem interested in passing judgments about any particular generational tendencies. This is how the movie circles back to Woody Allen in a roundabout and unspoken way, and not just because all of these characters seem likely to have opinions about both his work and public iterations of his personal life. Allen’s movies at their best impart a sense of fumbling through a working, imperfect philosophy—continuing on until the work itself became compromised by the moral murk of its author. What’s the appropriate response to any of that? After The Hunt implicitly repeats this question, though not especially in response to accusations leveled at well-known artists. In its imperfect way, the movie wonders about the phase when the adrenaline from any relentless pursuit fades, and we’re left to sit, discomfited, in a lack of certainty over what happens next.
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Writer: Nora Garrett
Starring: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloe Sevigny
Release Date: October 10, 2025
