I remember, a few years ago, a lot of people pontificating about the effect that cancel culture was going to have on the arts. We were entering a new era of censoriousness, they said, and pretty soon it wouldn’t be possible to tell any kind of story that didn’t serve the progressive orthodoxy. Now that we are in the midst of what can only be described as a full-throated, society-wide reaction against everything that cancel culture supposedly represented, it’s notable that movies haven’t improved. Nor have we seen any intelligent retrospectives on the era of BLM and MeToo. After the Hunt, the latest film from the prolific Luca Guadagnino, tries to fill this void.

After the Hunt is a period piece, set during peak Woke. With that being said, the actual timing of the film is rather fuzzy. It flashes forward five years in the denouement, to the 2025 California wildfires, which means that most of the film takes place in 2020, during COVID—which is not a feature of the story whatsoever. This might seem like pedantry, but it really encapsulates the film’s muddle-headed approach to its subject matter.

Ari Aster’s Eddington was a recent film that tried to explore the social changes occurring in 2020, through the character of an idiot sheriff who is forced to deal with, on the one hand, the grave indignity of being expected to wear a mask in the supermarket, and, on the other, an assault on his small town by a crack team of elite Antifa terrorists. I thought that Eddington was pretty unfocused, but it absolutely benefited from Aster’s mordant sense of the absurd, and had some genuinely funny moments.

After the Hunt is, by comparison, a film that really wants to be taken seriously as both a drama and as a summing up of the MeToo movement. The protagonist, Alma (Julia Roberts), is a teacher in philosophy at Yale University. In the film’s opening, she hosts a party at her luxurious apartment with other members of the philosophy department, including Alma’s proteges, Maggie (Ayo Edibiri), a PhD candidate from a mega-rich family which has made huge donations to the university, and Hank (Andrew Garfield), a tutor who has fought his way up the faculty ladder tooth-and-nail, and now has a chance at tenure.

Before we get into the meat of the plot, I would just note that this opening scene lets the film down badly. None of their dialogue is believable. For instance, a group of supposed philosophy academics blithely label Nietzsche, who died in 1900, as a Nazi (while Heidegger, who was an actual member of the Nazi Party, is instead called out for his treatment of Hannah Arendt). I thought at first that perhaps the characters were meant to come across as a bunch of annoying pseuds, but no, they really are meant to be very clever and sophisticated.

All of the characters drink too much at this party, and at the end of the night Hank offers to walk Maggie, who is queer, home to her apartment. The next night, Maggie comes to see Alma in tears and alleges that Hank sexually assaulted her. It is not spoiling anything about the movie to say that it always treats the truth of this allegation as a complete unknowable. Whenever either Maggie or Hank discuss the incident, the camera zooms into an extreme close-up on their face and goes all wobbly, just to make very clear to the audience that we have entered the character’s febrile subjectivity, and all notions of Truth can be thrown out the window.

Unfortunately, After the Hunt is too busy taking cheap shots at the MeToo movement to actually preserve any feeling of dramatic ambiguity. Maggie quickly devolves into a two-dimensional caricature of a campus rape accuser – egotistical, playing to the media, getting all her ducks in a row. It is soon revealed that Hank had suspicions that she plagiarised part of her thesis, and he claims that this is why she has accused him. Ultimately, although Hank himself is shown to be a pretty repellent individual, Maggie comes across as so insincere and self-serving that it’s hard for her character to make sense except on the assumption that she has made the whole thing up.

As for Julia Roberts’ Alma, she is (ironically, given the role plagiarism plays in the plot) a pretty weak imitation of Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tar, from Tar – a high-powered, virtuoso white woman who is brilliant in her field but whose personal life is a total mess. There is even a scene where Alma goes in on a snowflake student who claims to find the philosophical concept of the Other, well, othering—just as Tar humiliates a student for calling Bach a dead white male (at Julliard? Really?). But Tar had other things going for it, mainly the fact that Lydia Tar herself was an interesting character. Alma has nowhere near as much depth; there’s a lot of time given to her weird, sexless relationship with her psychoanalyst husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), but we never really get a sense of what brought them together in the first place or why they have stayed together.

The film seems surprised to reach its own climax, and gambles everything on a last-minute revelation about Alma’s personal history which is, at best, totally baffling, and, at worst, offensively stupid. And then there’s a jaunty coda where we find out what happened to all of the characters; its chief message seems to be that these are all just meaningless power games played by the rich and privileged, which I suppose is a sort of defence of After the Hunt’s utter lack of substance.

I will say that the film looks great; all the colours are very rich and the bourgeois interiors are warm and inviting. The score, by frequent Guadagnino collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is uncharacteristically obtrusive and certainly can’t rescue such a bad script. I would, however, recommend Reznor’s soundtrack for 2025’s Tron: Ares – a film which probably has about as much to say about society as After the Hunt.

 

After the Hunt is now playing in cinemas.