LUCA GUADAGNINO'S 'AFTER THE HUNT' WANTS TO BE A MORAL THRILLER—BUT IT'S TOO PRETTY TO GET UGLY

Luca Guadagnino makes beautiful movies about ugly emotions. From Call Me by Your Name to Challengers, he’s turned desire, power, and ego into cinematic perfume — lush, indulgent, and faintly dangerous. After the Hunt, his latest film, wants to be another entry in that canon: a moral thriller wrapped in the hushed prestige of academia. But somewhere between the marble hallways and honeyed lighting, the message gets lost.

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The setup has teeth. Julia Roberts stars as Alma Imhoff, a philosophy professor at Yale whose world tilts when a student (played by Ayo Edebiri) accuses a colleague—and Alma’s close friend—of sexual assault. Andrew Garfield plays the accused, Hank, slippery in all the right ways; Roberts’s Alma becomes the reluctant moral center, torn between loyalty and conscience as the university closes ranks.

On paper, it’s a potent cocktail: #MeToo politics, generational divides, the ethics of mentorship and belief. Guadagnino’s camera glides through ivy-covered courtyards and candle-lit faculty dinners with his signature sensuality. But that’s also the problem. Everything looks good but none of it feels real. And that tension—between feeling and framing—is what defines After the Hunt.

Julia Roberts gives a performance so brittle you can practically hear it crack; she’s playing a woman who's built an entire career on composure and is now choking on it. Ayo Edebiri, meanwhile, is the film’s pulse: impatient, incisive, and visibly allergic to the moral gymnastics of her elders. And Garfield, all wounded charm and entitlement, makes the case for why “nice guys” are still dangerous.

When we first meet this trio—Hank, Alma, Maggie—and the resident campus psychotherapist, Kim (played by Chloë Sevigny), they’re doing what academics do best: talking circles around themselves over wine in Alma and Frederik’s perfectly cluttered living room. They debate “the perceived existence of a collective morality,” their laughter just a little too loud, their intellects just a little too pleased with themselves. And all of this smarty smart talky talk is supposed hint at big happening.

Because Hank and Alma are assistant professors of philosophy (and both are in hot pursuit of tenure), the film can’t resist showing off its bookshelf. Conversations are peppered with references to Foucault’s panopticon, Adorno’s Minima Moralia, Freud’s misogyny, and, in one particularly cringe-inducing moment, Hegel’s “little Hegel”. Maggie’s dissertation is supposedly on the “resurgence of virtue ethics,” while Hank insists she plagiarized from Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer—a claim the movie never bothers to substantiate.

While watching, it’s hard not to wish Guadagnino would let the film sweat a little more. The script is built for mess—for shame and fury—but he can’t resist smoothing the edges. After the Hunt wants to examine complicity; instead, it ends up aestheticizing it.

The film, ultimately, puts a lot on the buffet. It has something to say about academia. Something to say about abuse of power. About entitlement among young people. About #MeToo. But all of it is under-salted and half-baked. Don’t get me wrong, there are some great scenes, great performances, and great writing here. The dialogue is snappy, quippy, and even, at times, funny. The characters are complex and multidimensional. The score is magnetic. The cinematography is lurid. Taken individually, After the Hunt has all the ingredients for a perfect film. Yet none of it amounts to anything substantial.

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Guadagnino and screenwriter Nora Garrett clearly want to raise the red flag about how power moves through institutions, how it mutates, how it seduces. But instead of dissecting that power, the film seems entranced by it. The camera hovers over mahogany desks, expensive wine, and astute faculty as if to remind us that complicity can look quite exquisite. Maybe that's the point?

Still, there’s something magnetic about watching Roberts’s Alma unravel. She’s a woman who’s spent decades mastering detachment, now forced to decide whether neutrality is just another form of cowardice. The film doesn’t offer an answer—and I honest can't decide that the film's success or its failure. Guadagnino may have gilded the darkness, but the questions linger long after the credits: Who do we protect? Who do we believe? And what do we lose when morality becomes performance?

Ayo Edebiri, too, is a standout. She brings bite and vulnerability to Maggie, the student whose accusation sets everything in motion. Where Roberts brings gravitas, Edebiri brings precision and an understanding that youth and impulse aren’t the same thing. Andrew Garfield is perfectly cast as the accused professor, charming enough to make you doubt yourself for believing he’s guilty, smug enough to remind you why you shouldn’t. There are true flashes of brilliance scattered throughout. I mean, Guadagnino knows how to build atmosphere. And yet, for all its beauty, After the Hunt feels emotionally distant—like watching a scandal unfold through the glass of a museum case.

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The film’s greatest misstep is this detachment. Guadagnino seems so afraid of taking a side that he takes none at all. The movie’s thesis—if it has one—seems to be that everyone is a little bit guilty and everyone suffers. Which is true, maybe. But it’s also safe.

That safety undercuts what could have been an incisive story about complicity. The most provocative idea buried in After the Hunt isn’t about guilt or innocence. It’s about silence. The way institutions breed it, the way friendship sustains it, the way power rewards it. But instead of pushing that idea to its uncomfortable conclusion, the film lingers. And it ends up being a film about power made by someone who’s too enamored with beauty to look at power directly.

It’s frustrating because Guadagnino has shown he can marry style and substance before. Call Me by Your Name was as lush as it was aching. Bones and All managed to make cannibalism tender. Even Challengers, his most overtly glossy film, had a sharp, self-aware edge.

Guadagnino is as prolific as he is divisive, but always interesting. More often than not I admire, or at the very least, understand what he’s doing. Guadagnino knows how to make images stick in your mind. But somehow I left this film stuck to nothing and feeling empty. Two and half hours of extreme close ups and meaty monologues later, I realized this is film that mistakes ambiguity for depth.

3.5/5 ★: Tries to say everything—ends up saying nothing.