Am I the Drama?
By Matthew Eng
New York Film Festival 2025:
After the Hunt
Dir. Luca Guadagnino, U.S./Italy, Amazon MGM Studios
Perhaps we really are living in Lydia Tár’s world. By the end of the decade, it will likely be possible to program a series devoted to films in which our most distinguished and decorated screen actresses play high-powered antiheroines of dubious pasts, glacial personalities, and transgressive proclivities. This is the archetype fearsomely immortalized by Cate Blanchett as the grandstanding conductor cancelled within an inch of her life in Todd Field’s Tár (2022) and shakily essayed by Nicole Kidman as the sub-inclined CEO in Halina Reijn’s misbegotten Babygirl (2024). The 21st-century blueprint was arguably first drawn by Isabelle Huppert, who seemed to commandeer authorship of Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016) as a video game executive seeking something far murkier than mere vengeance in the wake of sexual violence. But no performer, to my mind, has come closer to perfecting this model than Léa Drucker as a ruinous, stepson-seducing defender of women in Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer (2023). Female empowerment is inextricable from pernicious behavior in all of these movies, the more penetrating of which are not flagrant bids for social relevance but tailor-made vehicles for middle-aged actresses to flex their thespian muscles as they hold court on a throne of immoral muck.
It isn’t surprising that the prolific, trend-chasing Italian director Luca Guadagnino would throw his Dior sunglasses into this particular ring with After the Hunt, in which an enigmatic Ivy League professor is dragged into a case of campus assault involving a close colleague and a prized pupil. What is surprising is that rather than rejoin his frequent collaborator Tilda Swinton, who could render steeliness with cracks of vulnerability over the course of a MoMA-exhibited nap, Guadagnino has recruited Julia Roberts, whose name conjures faint but still audible echoes of that double-edged sobriquet “America’s sweetheart,” as his self-preserving ice queen. This is an inspired feat of stunt casting, and it is transfixing enough to watch a blonde Roberts swan around her airy apartment and crowded classrooms in each of costume designer Giulia Piersanti’s impeccably tailored outfits.
But the spell is short-lived. Roberts’s Alma Olsson is a philosophy professor at Yale who evinces the imperious air of the tenured despite, improbably, only coming up for it during the current academic year over which the narrative transpires. Guadagnino and first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett introduce the character at this critical juncture in her academic career and tidily establish the characters and circumstances that round out her cloistered world during an at-home soirée. There is Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), the analyst husband who doubles as a constant helpmate, cooking all of Alma’s meals, rubbing her feet, and placing her vitamins on the nightstand each morning like clockwork. There is Hank (Andrew Garfield, bearded and loud), the younger, cocky, and equally untenured coworker/competitor who is fond of ridiculing the hypersensitivity of Kids These Days and whose farewells to Alma are freighted with eyebrow-raising intimacy. And there is, finally, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), the promising, worshipful PhD student whom Alma has taken under her wing, less for the rigor of her intellect, we are made to suspect, than that she is a queer Black woman whose parents are billionaire donors to the university.
After the Hunt is never as focused and insinuating as it is in these opening passages, which are suffused with a thrumming dread, aided by the jolting glitches, honking flourishes, and earwormy refrains of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score. It is certain that something terrible will happen, but Guadagnino’s film leaves its options enticingly open. Alma doubles over in pain at the end of the night and vomits at work the next morning, suffering in silence from a mystery ailment. And then there is the envelope that Maggie conveniently discovers taped underneath a cupboard shelf in Alma and Frederik’s guest bathroom, the contents of which contain a black-and-white photo of a handsome, unidentified man, studded with hearts and doodles. Intriguing baits abound here, clouding the film’s catalyzing incident: Maggie’s accusation that Hank raped her after walking her home from Alma’s party. Hank, for his part, refutes the allegation as revenge for confronting Maggie about lifting parts of her dissertation on “virtue ethics” word-for-word from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Alma, to whom Maggie first confides the attack, is pulled into the conflict against her will. But faced with the choice of aligning herself with a well-connected victim, of whom she openly appears skeptical, or disposing of her rival for permanent employment, Alma opts for the career-minded alternative. But the war is hardly won—and only accelerates when an ignominious incident from Alma’s past is uncovered by Maggie.
The ensuing fallout starts off subdued, contained as if vacuum-sealed among its core four characters. The student body is mostly an abstraction full of reductive mouthpieces and the larger network of faculty, administrators, and staffers is largely a blur; among the exceptions are Alma’s loose-lipped colleague (Chloë Sevigny, a shrewd actress cast for her status as It Girl Emeritus and subsequently wasted) and the Dean of Humanities, played by an actor whose halting, ill-prepared presence only made sense once I discovered that he is David Leiber, Guadagnino’s art dealer. The latter character admits to Alma in an early scene that he is in the business of “optics, not substance,” and one feels the filmmaker’s heavy wink (or is it a sigh?) in the moment; the line could be an aperçu from those either agnostic on Guadagnino or those who loathe him, who simply see him as a cultivator of vibes. It is by now a cliché to allege that his films offer more in the way of surface luxuries than intellectual stimulation, but the chasm is especially apparent in a film that at one point finds Roberts stiffly lecturing on the panopticon. The majority of critics have pilloried the film since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival for lacking insight on #MeToo and cancel culture, but I’m not sure why these critics expected Guadagnino, of all filmmakers, to compose a disquisition on any of his ostensible themes.
The director has never worn his influences lightly, and the inspirations here are primarily cinematic. For some reason, Alma owns a framed poster of Pedro Almodóvar’s underrated The Flower of My Secret (1995), in which a military wife leads a double life as a romance novelist. (Guadagnino’s hat tip to the film, remembered today as a transitional effort that marked its maker’s bid for maturity after years of gaudy provocation, could be an oblique signal of his own career goals.) The actors recite and receive dialogue as though in an Ingmar Bergman film, staring directly into the lens of cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, returning to feature-length photography for the first time since his paradigm-shifting work in Hype Williams’s Belly (1998). Bergman is not quite the artist being aped on this project, but rather Woody Allen, who also cribbed freely from the Swedish master in a handful of moody, cerebral dramas that have been singled out by Guadagnino as key references for After the Hunt. The elder persona non grata isn’t just a source but a guiding force; even the title cards mimic Allen’s right down to the font and alphabetized cast lists. The unwavering focus on a female academic recalls Allen’s entrancing character study Another Woman (1988), in which Gena Rowlands also played an urbane philosophy professor who feels her internal foundation wobble to the brink of collapse; the midfilm reveal of a hideaway office apartment where Alma does more snoozing than writing makes the allusion plain for those who know the earlier film.
But After the Hunt cannot ultimately hold up to the power of its supposed predecessors. It’s an increasingly dreary and thuddingly crass affair, the kind of drama in which the emergence of a manic pill dependency midway through the narrative is meant to tell us something substantial about its protagonist’s disposition. As written and rendered, these characters are merely the outlines of serious people. Another Woman may be laser-focused on Rowlands’s character, but it surrounds her with an array of personalities—among them, Ian Holm, Gene Hackman, a blood-curdling Betty Buckley, and a scorched-earth Sandy Dennis—who are vivid and vital no matter how briefly glimpsed, palpably belonging to a world that exceeds the frame. It is difficult to imagine any of the characters in Guadagnino’s film crossing the street if the act isn’t captured on camera. A peripheral figure like Maggie’s nonbinary partner Alex (Lío Mehiel) exists mainly to be misgendered. But then, Maggie herself is never greater than the sum of her privilege and ambition in the eyes of Garrett and Guadagnino, who hold the character’s very being in such contempt that the validity of her accusations becomes moot to the film, and the otherwise resourceful Edebiri is left to flounder in a cavalierly conceived role. Stuhlbarg emerges unscathed by mugging and impeding the hyperliterate patter of his scene partners as only a self-assured, rock-solid veteran can, but he is also the performer least beholden to realism, like an overcompensating actor playing George in a hastily assembled production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Such shoddiness extends, most pressingly, to the empty center that is Alma, who proves to be a charisma vacuum for the bona fide movie star tasked with animating her. Roberts’s singularity cannot help but be subsumed by both her indeterminate character and the frenetic formalism of a director who believes, for example, that Roberts should compete for close-ups with the chicken wing on which Garfield chomps during a crucial conversation. The actress is a brick wall in her seesawing exchanges with Edebiri when surely some modulation of response might have deepened their characters’ dynamic. Even the quest for tenure rings false since Roberts is devoid of the hungry striving that such a situation necessitates.
If Roberts seems like an unusual choice for the part, it is likely because her persona has been so easily reduced to the image of a woman guffawing at a snapped jewelry box or beaming at us in a Lancôme ad. The best of Roberts’s performances have always been laced with a not insignificant amount of acid verging on venom; her Erin Brockovich (2000) is remembered for the actress’ scrappy, can-do mettle, but her scorn and surliness are equally essential. It is Roberts’s redoubtable and truly once-in-a-generation charisma that has kept so many of us enthralled by—if not ardently devoted to—her characters, for whom we might decline to root if they were animated by anyone other than Roberts.
Miscasting, then, is not the issue. Rowlands was herself atypically cast in Another Woman, in which one of the most expressively unbridled emoters frequently dials down her approach to a state of mesmerizing immobility. To watch Rowlands underplay in Allen’s film is to witness a mid-career actress discard her playbook and assiduously disclose the enormity of her range. When Rowlands’s face freezes with blanched nausea, the look conveys the full existential horror of realizing that your life has been built on self-deception, that it is possible to make the dead-wrong choice and you have done so time and again. Soul-sick reckoning eludes Roberts, who comes across as a mildly miffed bystander rather than a pained, ethically compromised participant in the intrigue. When Alma climactically divulges a secret shame that we have, at this stage, already pieced together, Roberts speaks anguish but refrains from embodying it. Guadagnino’s direction of this scene appears more attuned to the multicolored machine lights that beam across Roberts’s body as she sits in a hospital than the revelation towards which his film has been building.
And yet for all that is irksome and enervating about After the Hunt, up to and including its frivolous, fourth wall-breaking coda, there remains something fitfully arresting about watching a motley crew of filmmakers collectively attempt to lift up a mirror to Big Issues and crack it repeatedly. The film’s impulses and aspirations remain tantalizingly legible beneath or maybe because of all the failed stabs at cultural commentary, intrapersonal suspense, and psychological portraiture. It desperately wants to get its hands dirty—filthy, even—but refuses to remove its gloves.