After the Hunt: LFF Film Review
After the Hunt was one of my most anticipated films of the festival because so many people I love are involved – Luca Guadagnino, Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri – so it gives me no pleasure to report that it’s a huge disappointment.
Roberts plays Alma, a Yale philosophy professor who is forced to confront her past when her favourite student Maggie (Edebiri) accuses Alma’s colleague and close friend Hank (Garfield) of sexually assaulting her after a party. Alma finds herself stuck in the middle of the ‘he said she said’ dilemma, with both parties wanting her to believe and publicly support them.
I really thought that After the Hunt would be edgy and boundary-breaking and tackle the thorny subject matter with gusto. Unfortunately, it’s not as provocative and thought-provoking as it thinks it is. This is because the script, written by first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett, is messy and incoherent and ties itself up in knots trying to cover so many topics – sexual assault, power, privilege, gender identity and more – that it ultimately doesn’t know what it’s trying to say. It hits all of these key buzzwords but only on a surface level, rather than digging deeper, and moves on to the next topic without really saying anything.
Keeping the central dilemma ambiguous makes a lot of sense and is very true to real life. A lot of these cases aren’t cut and dry, and only the two people involved know what really happened, in the absence of concrete evidence. So Alma really is put in a difficult spot between these two, so it’s understandable that she loses her cool. But, she’s actually not a very nice person. In fact, there are no likeable characters in this movie except for Frederik, Alma’s long-suffering husband, played by the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg. This means you have nobody to root for or connect with.
I cannot fault the performances; everyone is so committed to their awful characters. But I wish they were given better material. I came away so confused, wondering what the film was trying to say. It says a lot of things but they don’t add up to much. I really don’t know what to make of it or how to feel, except disappointed that it didn’t live up to expectations. What a bummer.
Seen at the London Film Festival. In cinemas from Friday 17th October and streaming on Prime Video from Thursday 20th November