Julia Roberts anchors Luca Guadagnino’s latest, a heady, too-long tangle of power, privilege and bad behavior that co-stars Dorchester’s Ayo Edebiri
By Dana Barbuto/Boston Movie News
Thriving on discomfort, contradiction and the messy entanglements of privilege and power, Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” is a combustible campus psychodrama that dishes out a tawdry tale of sex, lies, and bad behavior.
Julia Roberts commands the screen as Alma, a Yale philosophy professor with a wardrobe full of black blazers, chunky loafers, and a gaze sharp enough to turn you to stone. She’s brilliant, adored, and utterly unfuckwithable. Her husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a psychotherapist who sees her clearly but never tries to tame her. Their marriage hums with wary respect—not broken, just complicated.
Hank (Andrew Garfield), Alma’s longtime friend and colleague—maybe more—shares an easy chemistry with her that occasionally flickers into something charged. Both seek the same tenure spot, are used to being the smartest person in any room, and have built careers on charm and control. When one of their promising PhD students (Dorchester’s Ayo Edebiri) accuses Hank of “crossing a line,” the fallout threatens to ruin them.
The party scene that sets it all off is a perfect little Ivy League hellscape: leather-bound books on the shelves, everyone drunk on wine and self-righteousness, quoting Kierkegaard and Foucault between drags on their cigarettes. The noise of a constantly ticking clock ups the ante. Something’s about to detonate.
Garfield plays Hank with scruffy magnetism and just enough sexy sleaze to make you a tad uneasy. He flirts too easily, talks too fast, and believes his intellect is its own moral defense. His scenes with Roberts are electric: a collision of equals circling each other with old desire and new distrust.
As the accusation ripples outward, the film becomes a study in collateral damage. Careers, relationships, and reputations collapse under the weight of gossip, suspicion and moral posturing. Guadagnino’s camera shows constantly moving hands and lingers on close-ups of faces caught between empathy and opportunism—people desperate to do the right thing, if only they knew what that was. Generational gaps appear: younger academics frame every conflict in terms of harm and identity, while their older mentors roll their eyes and reach for another drink.
Alma tries to stay above it all, but her façade cracks. Roberts makes every micro-expression count; it’s a chilly performance from an Oscar winner (“Erin Brockovich”) who knows exactly how to weaponize her bitchiness, even if Nora Garrett’s debut script can’t quite keep pace. The film juggles a lot of issues—race, gender, class and consent—and at 139 minutes, it drags. But when Roberts starts to unravel, you can’t look away.
Edebiri, on the other hand, struggles to summon the needed empathy and ambiguity. Her character’s identity—a Black, gay student from privilege—complicates things in ways the script isn’t ready for. She’s victim and villain, outsider and insider. Guadagnino seems intrigued by that tension but never fully realizes it, and Edebiri lacks the depth or danger to make it feel real.
Guadagnino regular Stuhlbarg (my favorite in “Call Me by Your Name”) once again proves he can steal a scene with the quietest gestures, whether making cassoulet or dismantling Alma’s self-delusions with a raised eyebrow. Chloë Sevigny, as Alma’s colleague and drinking buddy, delivers the most insightful observation, lamenting a generation that can’t stop talking about its trauma: “Whatever happened to burying it and developing a crippling co-dependency in your 30s?”
By the end, everyone’s violated something—a boundary, a confidence, a professional code. “After the Hunt” doesn’t solve the puzzle of post-#MeToo era morality. It doesn’t even try. Instead, it revels in the gray areas of self-destruction, hypocrisy, and philosophical doublespeak. You almost forget something bad was ever alleged to have happened, which might be the film’s most unsettling trick.
‘After the Hunt’
Rating: R for language and some sexual content
Cast: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Writer: Nora Garrett
Running time: 139 minutes
Where to watch: In theaters
Grade: B-
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