Movie Review: After The Hunt (2025)

Genre: Drama  

Director: Luca Guadagnino  

Starring: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edibiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloe Sevigny  

Running Time: 139 minutes  

Synopsis: Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) is a well-respected philosophy professor at Yale University. Married to Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg), she is in a friendly competition with fellow professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) to secure a tenured position, and their relationship is at least flirtatious. Black post-graduate student Maggie (Ayo Edibiri) is the daughter of important donors, and harbours a crush on Alma. When Maggie reveals that Hank sexually assaulted her, careers are threatened, generational fissures are exposed, and long-held secrets re-emerge.

What Works Well: This drama dives into the deep end of the campus cesspool, where multiple culture clashes encompass the generational divide, racial tension, sexual misconduct, faculty rivalries, and plagiarism. The overlapping crises disrupt a pretention-packed intellectual salon, and Julia Roberts allows Alma to navigate an uncharted path with a mixture of courage, fumbles, and outspokenness.

What Does Not Work As Well: The intentionally dark and muddy visual aesthetic reflects moral murkiness, but is nevertheless suffocating. Within an already odious liberal arts academic milieu, misguided self-obsession combines with false entitlement to classify all the characters as insufferable. The music score is gimmicky, the running time 30 minutes too long, and even within the frame of no easy answers, plenty of loose plot ends are left hanging.

Key Quote:

Maggie: I don't feel comfortable having this conversation with you anymore.

Alma: Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable, Maggie. 

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