After the Hunt (dir. Luca Guadagnino)

by Jack Martin | Oct 19, 2025

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 139 mins

UK Distributor: Sony Pictures

UK Release Date: 17 October 2025

WHO’S IN AFTER THE HUNT?

Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny, Lío Mehiel, Ariyan Kassam, Will Price, Thaddea Graham, Christine Dye, Burgess Byrd

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Luca Guadagnino (director, producer), Nora Garrett (writer), Jeb Brody, Brian Grazer and Allan Mandelbaum (producers), Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (composers), Malik Hassan Sayeed (cinematographer), Marco Costa (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A college professor (Roberts) becomes caught between a scandal involving her colleague (Garfield) and her student (Edebiri)…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON AFTER THE HUNT?

A movie like After the Hunt shouldn’t be as bad as it is. Boasting pedigree talent on both sides of the camera, including A-list stars like Julia Roberts and Andrew Gafield along with prolific filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, as well as a hot-button central topic that’s on the tip of most people’s tongues in today’s world, this film was until recently destined to leave an impact on audiences and maybe even gain some awards attention for its relevant issues.

Then, people actually saw the movie. And like the insufferable cast of characters that it chooses to predominantly focus on, After the Hunt revealed itself to be nothing more than an empty vessel of hot noise, saying a lot yet so little at the same time in a script that completely fails to make good on any of its potential. You’ll come away feeling as though your precious time has been wasted, which shouldn’t be the case for a film with this level of talent behind it, all of whom are wasted on material that is baffling in theory yet staggeringly alien in execution.

The film follows Roberts as Alma Imhoff, a respected Yale professor who maintains a close friendship with fellow lecturer Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), with whom she is up against for tenure, and looks upon her PhD student Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri) as her most promising protégé. Everything changes, however, when Maggie approaches Alma with disturbing news: whilst walking home from a dinner party thrown by Alma and her psychiatrist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), Hank allegedly made more than a few unwanted advances toward her, something that Hank flatly denies when confronted later. But by that point, the damage is done and Alma, whose refusal to go up to bat for either party results in pushback from both, slowly becomes dragged into the backlash stemming from the accusations that rock the university grounds.

From that basic description alone, there appear to be plenty of opportunities for After the Hunt to address the concerns surrounding cancel culture in today’s post-#MeToo world, yet the film truly doesn’t know how to work with any of them. The script, by actor Nora Garrett in her screenwriting debut, fills the vast and empty void with dialogue that constantly sounds like first drafts for intentionally provocative Twitter posts, complete with numerous buzzwords and pseudo-intellectual musings about everything under the sun from generational privilege to the patriarchal systems that institutes like Yale abide by, while relying on impossibly contrived devices to move the story along, such as an early discovery of an all-too conveniently hidden envelope containing sensitive information that comes into play later on. Beyond that, it’s an almost unbearably descriptive film, as characters simply tell others about things that have happened off screen rather than actually showing them, and there’s never a point where you’re invested in any of it because the character work is surface-level and the things that they’re talking about have no true weight to them once you try and cut through all the pretentious fog.

As clumsily written as it may be, Guadagnino’s direction here somehow makes the film feel so much messier. While undoubtedly a talented filmmaker, Guadagnino makes a series of baffling choices that make you wonder if this is indeed the same guy who made Call Me By Your Name or Challengers, since at times they make the professionally made movie feel like something a second-year film student would make as part of their practical module. For example, the director uses a lot of tight close-ups of actors looking directly into the barrel of the camera as though he’s trying to replicate the style of Jonathan Demme, but the method doesn’t ever factor into the storytelling and constantly distracts with its obnoxiously up-and-close nature to a point where you’re no longer even paying attention to the actual conversations. Factor in how it’s all set to one of the worst scores that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have put out, with the composers contributing an irritating two-note theme that sounds like they were only given five minutes to come up with the music, and you have something that feels unusually lazy for a filmmaker of such talent.

The performances by otherwise great actors suffer under such lethargic direction, for while Roberts, Garfield and Edebiri are all trying to elevate their sloppily written roles, they are instructed to deliver these lines with an unbearably smug and self-satisfied tone that makes you actively want these characters’ lives to fall apart out of spite for their annoying nature. Sometimes, in the particular case of Stuhlbarg, they flaunt about the set with no apparent direction given to them, with the actor left to deliver a wildly inconsistent performance that doesn’t match those of his co-stars and comes off as distractingly weird in a film that is otherwise aiming, or at least trying to aim, for muted resonance.

At least a good half hour longer than a movie like this ever needed to be, After the Hunt drags its feet while delivering a half-hearted study into topics that deserve a much stronger movie to feature in. It’s almost shocking how much this movie completely fumbles its potential, resulting in some of the worst work in recent memory by a lot of talented individuals who have come together to embarrass themselves with material that not even they can elevate. If it’s a movie you’re after that’s about the fallout from a campus assault, for the love of God watch Sorry, Baby before even thinking about this more star-studded yet extremely inferior replicant.

SO, TO SUM UP…

After the Hunt is shockingly terrible, not just because of the exceptional talent involved making some of their worst contributions in recent years, but also for its utterly empty and insufferably smug handling of topical subject matter that leaves it with absolutely nothing to say.