“Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable,” says Julia Roberts in Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt. Roberts plays a beloved college professor who finds her loyalties torn between her colleague (Andrew Garfield) and her star student (Ayo Edebiri) after the latter accuses the former of having “crossed the line.” After The Hunt‘s marketing played up its nervy provocations, willingness to explore the tangled nuances within campus culture, and accusations of sexual abuse and misconduct. After a miniature boom of movies influenced by the #MeToo movement, After The Hunt seemed like it was aiming for a no-holds-barred dissection of life in a post-MeToo world. Instead, it feels almost pre-MeToo in its ideas, even though it’s clearly a film that wouldn’t exist without the past eight years’ worth of change. If the immediate aftermath of one of the entertainment industry’s biggest paradigm shifts promised empathy and change, After The Hunt dismisses that with a smarmy “both sides” refrain. If nothing else, though, that is in keeping with the times.
Reviews of After The Hunt have largely lambasted the film for its mealy-mouthed timidity and refusal to get any deeper on substantive issues beyond the basic markers. The Guardian called out the way “the laboriously nurtured ambiguity and complexity just become an evasive and noncommittal jumble of ideas,” while The BFI wryly noted that “After the Hunt feels like what you get when you emulate Todd Fields’ terrific Tár minutely, yet somehow miss its savagery.” Indeed, Fields’ piercing drama, about a legendary composer whose private abuses seep into her professional life, is mentioned frequently in reviews of After The Hunt. The complex cultural culpability and power dynamics that define both narratives are treated very differently, with Guadagnino offering no new perspectives or even having the nerve to be truly ambiguous about them. Especially when compared to films like Tár, After The Hunt lacks the kind of penetrating insight audiences need around a politicized battle that has helped define our lives—and influence our shifting pop culture—over the past decade.
In October 2017, a decade after Tarana Burke began using the “me too” terminology, both The New Yorker and The New York Times published extensive reports into allegations of sexual assault made against the infamous producer Harvey Weinstein. After this high-profile coverage came the wave. Major stars and power players were toppled from their pedestals and the staid institutions of power were forced to finally make incremental steps towards justice. It didn’t last long before the inevitable backlash began, but in that initial, almost-surreal rush of action and fury, it felt like progress. A new future didn’t seem unrealistic, and films sought to depict it.
Much like the instinctive first entries into COVID cinema, entertainment reacting to MeToo was initially defined by a rush to exclude the offenders. The detailed accusations against Kevin Spacey led Ridley Scott to entirely remove his performance from All The Money In The World, replacing him with Christopher Plummer through a mere nine days of reshoots. Other projects were shelved altogether. Spacey’s Gore Vidal biopic, anything with Weinstein’s name attached—even retro releases, some decades old, were suddenly absent from streaming platforms, like the Michael Jackson episode of The Simpsons. There was a reasoning behind this approach—there were so few tangible options available, why not try to hit abusers in their pocketbooks—and yet, it did feel a little like collectively putting our heads in the sand and convincing ourselves it was justice. Making the accused go away, rather than confronting the institutional rot and wider culpability of the system, is just easier.
As Weinstein awaited trial, #MeToo cinema began to take shape. A handful of films were heralded as the first wave of artistic responses to the case. Though The Assistant, Kitty Green’s astute and claustrophobic drama, never names Harvey Weinstein or even shows its predatory boss, critics immediately drew parallels thanks to its smothering portrayal of a toxic workplace ruled over by an unseen tyrant. Green had initially quit filmmaking after years of misogyny but returned to make this film, pivoting her focus to the entertainment industry after the Weinstein story broke—even interviewing former employees of The Weinstein Company. This was the first film of #MeToo to pull back the curtain on the industry’s biggest open secret.
Julia Garner plays the latest low-level hire at an entertainment mogul’s office, a position of thankless drudgery and crooked facades. She is endlessly humiliated by this creep but expected to clean up after his messes, sometimes literally; in one scene, she scrubs ominous stains from his office couch. She even writes him apologetic emails, pleading that she will “not let you down again.” She finds herself grateful, like a beaten dog, when she gets a secondhand compliment from her boss. It’s an act of humiliation, another way in which powerful abusers wield their might against others, and one that instantly had people thinking of Weinstein’s NDAs. The Assistant was the most literal response to #MeToo that wasn’t an actual biopic, and a much-needed rebuttal to decades of stories where sexy secretaries and domineering seductresses were the real enemy of the workplace (see the truly ridiculous Disclosure starring Demi Moore for the most notorious example.)
On a less grounded note, Promising Young Woman seemed, on its surface, like the cathartic “fuck you” many women were hoping for in the #MeToo era. A rape-revenge drama with a feminist slant and a hefty dose of cheeky satire? It certainly felt like a sharp contrast to much of the subgenre’s output. Horror titles like I Spit On Your Grave, made and written by men, were frequently accused of confusing leering exploitation with subversive liberation. But Emerald Fennell’s film wasn’t so easily categorized. Yes, it features Carey Mulligan as Cassie, a woman who acts as prey to potential predators, but this is no Ms .45. Cassie’s routine involves faking blackout drunkenness, allowing herself to be taken home by “nice” guys, then turning the tables when they try to take advantage of a helpless woman. But there’s no real justice in her crusade, no cathartic scene of her exerting bloody revenge on the perpetrators. Left bitter and shellshocked, Cassie turns herself into a martyr-in-waiting, ready to die for what may be a fruitless cause. Promising Young Woman confronts Cassie and the audience with the chilling reality that none of us are untouched by patriarchal rot. The nice guys are never nice, and the women will always be blamed for that. The film’s conclusion seems hopeful, but its optimism is fleeting—a feeling that came to represent much of this era.
But it didn’t take long to get films about #MeToo itself. She Said turned the New York Times investigation into Weinstein into a procedural drama that revealed the work required to bring down a titan. It’s a restrained production, an All The President’s Men-inspired film dedicated to the underappreciated work of gumshoe journalism. It’s also a tribute to the survivors of Weinstein’s abuses, who bravely stepped forward when there was no guarantee anyone would listen or believe them. There’s no glamor to the process of toppling a tyrant. It’s a lot of knocking on doors, meetings over coffee, and listening to normal people recount the most traumatic experience of their lives. She Said smartly keeps the focus on the work, and on the many victims who spoke up. There’s no need to beautify or dramatize something like Zelda Perkins, a former Miramax employee, speak methodically about saving a colleague from attempted rape. In the film’s most memorable scene, Weinstein calls into the Times‘ office to furiously defend himself. It’s the hot-headed, spluttering last gasp of power from a bully who knows he’s about to be toppled.
She Said did a far better job than Bombshell, which depicted the fall of Fox News boss Roger Ailes after several employees accused him of sexual misconduct. Filmmaker Jay Roach seemed too hesitant to tackle the fascinating and prickly reality of the story: That workers willingly engaged in a system designed to perpetuate misogyny for political gain would have to contend with that power being used against them. Instead, it aimed for pat heroics, depicting women like Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly as unwitting cogs in a machine forced to stand up for themselves as strong confident women. The rough edges of reality were sanded down to draw clear lines between good and bad—-unsurprisingly, the simpler story, focused outside of Hollywood, was the one to earn the Oscar nominations.
In this vein, where the mainstream was always hesitant to approach these stories head-on, it was through indie cinema and singular storytellers that the reverberations of #MeToo were given the complexities and emotional heft they deserved. In the world of TV, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You set a high bar. She plays Arabella, a writer who is assaulted on a night out and tries to piece together what happened, while reckoning with a societal disease that intersects with race, consent, gender, and justice. Arabella is forced to navigate the murkiness of her own memory in a world where victims, especially Black female victims, are ignored or sneered at. Her friend has a consensual hookup via Grindr, then is immediately assaulted by the same man. Her publisher gets too excited at the prospect of Arabella including a subplot about her own assault in her next book. In a victims’ support group, Arabella delivers an earth-shaking monologue about how abusers love to portray their targets as “crazy” while playing in that “gray area” of acceptability. It’s startling how much Coel encompasses in the show, from the commodification of trauma to the lie of the “perfect victim” to the weaponizing of whiteness. I May Destroy You became the platonic ideal of #MeToo media, a daring directory of societal rot rather than a rote rehashing of old tropes.
Across the pond, Sarah Polley’s film Women Talking was inspired by the true story of an isolated Mennonite community afflicted by a plague of drugging and rapes, impacting hundreds of girls and women. Polley’s film imagines the victims gathering together to make an impossible choice: Will they stay in their cloistered world and forgive the men who abused them, stay and fight for change, or pack up their things and leave? Though it has perhaps the most hopeful ending of any of the #MeToo films mentioned here, it still relies on entirely abandoning the world of men. Both Coel and Polley focused on “normal” women, a reminder that #MeToo did not begin or end in the backrooms of Los Angeles. Biopics can only tell so much of the story, and of so few people. The intimacies of both I May Destroy You and Women Talking ended up feeling universal through their perceptions of the personal made political.
But then the world began to move on. The slyest and most intriguing examination of a post-#MeToo cultural landscape comes from Todd Field’s Tár. Composer Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is a genius who has wrangled her life into a picture-perfect image of both power and inspiration. She’s a gay woman in a man’s world, both a subversion and a liable player. Like many of her disgraced male heroes, Lydia has a predatory gaze towards young and impressionable women who fall into her orbit. It’s an abuse that leads to her downfall—but not as much as leaked footage of her chastising a student for being too “woke” about classical music. In the so-called culture wars, Lydia is not a figure for change and has no qualms about browbeating those who step out of line, even if her entire career was dependent on pushing back. And like many accused abusers, her life is impacted, but not ruined. There is always a route back to the top for people like her.
Conductor Marin Alsop claimed the film was “anti-woman” for making a rare woman in her position an abuser, but power and abuse are not always gendered. Tár may complicate the #MeToo canon by having a woman in this role, but it is not unrealistic or sexist—it’s a trick that Field wants us to contend with. How often have we instantly searched for a way to excuse a bad person?
#MeToo cinema asks whether it’s even possible for the same institutions that fostered a generational hub of gendered violence to make art that dissects these issues without exacerbating the problem. How do you square a film like She Said or Women Talking being executive produced by alleged abuser Brad Pitt? Is there any real victory in the back-slapping spectacle of awards season for such works, when that was the same crowd that helped Weinstein accrue so much power? Easily carried along the shifting political and economic tides, Hollywood is now eagerly dismantling the diversity initiatives it sheepishly implemented following both #MeToo and Black Lives Matter protests, having been given permission to do so by an administration using pop culture as a battlefield to attack equality in all its forms. Many of the men who faced serious accusations or even admitted to their crimes are back in business, bolstered by “anti-woke” sentiment. Louis C.K. won Grammys. Kevin Spacey was welcomed with open arms to the Cannes and Venice Film Festivals. Brett Ratner just directed an Amazon documentary about Melania Trump.
The optimism those #MeToo protests elicited has long since faded. The work has gotten harder, both in entertainment and real life, as studios renege on DEI promises and activists push back against anti-abortion bills. The films of the #MeToo era haven’t lost their relevance, although they cannot help but already feel like relics in their earnestness. And yet, there is something instructive in assessing the evolution of these movies. It’s no coincidence that the most potent of these works were made outside of the studio system and prioritized women’s voices. They were not made to win awards, or to let the people in power congratulate themselves, or—in the most recent iteration—to just ask questions. Maybe the industry seems so eager to move on because it was never all that invested in the first place.
