The plot of Luca Guadagnino’s latest film sees a college professor find herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star pupil levels an accusation against one of her colleagues and a dark secret from her own past threatens to come to light.
Guadagnino, as per usual, has amassed an impressive array of acting talent, including Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield. And as expected, they all deliver strong performances. Garfield in particular, as he goes through waves of entitled privilege and slimy charm, to bitterness, which eventually gives way to full-blown rage. This is in sharp contrast to Roberts, whose gives Alma a steely veneer that is tough to crack. A wall built up to deal with events from her past, and the male-dominated world in which she works.
That coldness is a symptom of the main problem with the film, in that all of the characters are so deeply unlikeable it is near-impossible to care about any of them. A group of people who are so self-involved that it is amazing they have time to converse with each other in classrooms or cocktail parties where they sit around trying to one-up each other by namedropping the most philosophers names, or saying the most banally intelligent sounding psychobabble.
Michael Stuhlbarg is exempt however, as he instills his withering husband with a venomous, barely-masked level of contempt, that he steals every scene that he is in. Especially when making his dramatic entrances and exits from the kitchen whilst Roberts and Edebiri attempt to have a conversation. Not only does he serve a great caussolet, he serves cunt, as the kids would say these days.
He effectively cuts through the word vomit on display. It feels like a film that wants to have a lot to say on sexual and gender politics, about the establishment, class, race, etc. The problem is that any real comment or message is completely drowned out by the white noise. What is the famous saying, “if you don’t have anything interesting to say, don’t say anything at all”.
The title and cast cards at the beginning of the film, which feature white text on black, use a font that seems to imitate Woody Allen. The director was quoted at the Venice press conference as saying it was indeed inspired by the works of “Bergman and Allen”, but it falls short of the great works of both.
Instead it feels like an off-Broadway play, where the theatricality of people sitting around talking is only broken up by an obsession with close up shots of people’s hands. It is only the strength of the performances that keeps the attention going for its padded runtime.
After The Hunt‘s tagline is “not everything is supposed to make you feel comfortable”. Unfortunately, the film left this critic uncomfortably numb to the events that a title card declares “happened at Yale”.
After The Hunt is in select cinemas from October 10 and everywhere from October 17
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Director: Luca Guadagnino
Stars: Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloe Sevigny
Runtime: 139 minutes
Country: USA
