Luca Guadagnino Goes Hunting for #MeToo’s Gray Areas

It’s unclear if Luca Guadagnino’s homage to Woody Allen in the opening credits of After the Hunt is meant to be mocking or heartfelt. All I know is that it can’t be a coincidence: The cast are listed in alphabetical order in Windsor typeface over a blaring jazz standard, Allen’s signature move since at least Annie Hall (1977). It’s a weird way to inaugurate an off-kilter film. On the one hand, After the Hunt is directly concerned with the consequences (or lack thereof) for men who pursue inappropriate relationships with younger women, something that Allen knows all too much about. On the other, Guadagnino’s university campus-set thriller is clearly channeling the crackling wit and sexual avidity of an earlier era—one exemplified by movies like Annie Hall and Manhattan (1979), where big ideas were brandished like swords and characters jumped casually into one another’s beds. Although Guadagnino cannot resist this bygone atmosphere of erotic repartee, After the Hunt is mainly concerned with lamenting that such a world no longer exists, having been replaced by safe spaces, where feelings are facts. The film’s tagline is “Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable.” Perhaps the nod to Woody was in the spirit of this thought.

In a story where “what happened” is a subject of debate, even a simple summary of events is bound to run into trouble, but here goes: Alma (Julia Roberts) is a well-respected professor of philosophy at Yale. She’s just approaching tenure at the same time as her puerile department colleague Henry (Andrew Garfield), with whom she may or may not be having an affair. They have both taken an interest in the education of Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a mediocre but impassioned philosophy student struggling to finish a dissertation about virtue signaling. One night, after one of those sharp-edged, wine-soaked intellectual parties at the professor’s house, unheard of nowadays, Henry and Maggie leave together and something happens. Maggie will only say that a line was crossed. Henry declares he did nothing; he only came back to her apartment to accuse Maggie of plagiarizing Agamben’s Homo Sacer in her dissertation draft. It seems to be up to Alma to decide who is lying.

Hardly warmhearted to begin with, Alma’s response to Maggie’s account is so frigid it’s shocking. She does none of the things viewers have come to expect a powerful woman to say or do to create a supportive environment. Though she claims to believe Maggie, and even appears to be reaching toward empathy at times, Alma’s instincts are to press her student for evidence and warn her against sharing her story more widely. The ambiguity of her relationship to Henry leaves open the question of how it shapes her judgment. Henry, for his part, immediately takes up the role of a martyr, comparing himself to a wounded wildebeest now cast out of the herd. In a confusing move that I have a hard time chalking up to bad acting on the parts of either Edebiri or Garfield, both characters relay their version of events as though they are lying, in voices edgy with defensiveness, repeating the same basic statements without elaboration. Lacking most relevant details about what exactly went down, viewers are left to stew with Alma in the dubious malaise of he-said-she-said for the rest of the film’s long second act.

Nora Garrett, who penned After the Hunt’s wickedly funny and densely referential script, has described the story as arising from her own ambivalence about the #MeToo movement of the late 2010s. “We were missing a sense of gray area,” she told Vanity Fair. But #MeToo only appeared that way in aggregate. In individual cases, details matter—indeed, the bare facts of any allegation (and the bravery of individual women to both name their attackers and describe exactly what happened to them) were essential to calling out misconduct and inspiring others to do the same. 

While the movement’s breakthrough in encouraging fellow survivors to share their stories led to a genuine shift in social conduct that is still being reckoned with, it was far from one-dimensional. #MeToo may have been adamant in its call to believe women’s stories about men abusing their power, but just as these stories vary widely, so should the responses to them. Details make all the difference, which is why the decision to remain coy about the film’s inciting incident starts to feel a bit shameless by the second hour. Even if nothing about the accused Henry is likeable, the film seems to increasingly align viewers’ perspectives with his, simply for the fact that he faces real consequences over a largely immaterial claim. When he’s fired from Yale, viewers are led to believe the school acted on hearsay. Is that what this film ultimately wants us to understand #MeToo as representing?

Alma, for her part, spends most of the film trying hard not to give a fuck. She seems more worried about making tenure. As tensions escalate around her, and Maggie’s story swells from the claustrophobic confines of Yale into national news, Alma starts avoiding office hours and ignoring phone calls. She hides out in an old apartment she keeps near Long Wharf, drinking heavily and chipping away at a new research paper to show her faculty review board. But as much as Alma might want it to, Maggie’s accusation doesn’t go away, and her posture of indifference becomes increasingly untenable, both on campus and at home. Viewers are left to wonder why this film’s protagonist so adamantly refuses to care, and what we are supposed to think or feel in her place.

The ultimate explanation—that Maggie’s story is causing Alma to relive some old trauma—might seem obvious on paper, but it nevertheless comes as a total surprise. The butchered delicacy of this reveal is the film’s major flaw, and speaks to the lack of coordination After the Hunt reaches at times. There’s simply too much going on, with such a wide tranche of A-list actors (including Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny in delicious supporting roles) bouncing off one another’s markedly different methods of revealing information – which range in tone from subtle to camp. Guadagnino, meanwhile, further distracts viewers with his typically brilliant flair, layering scene-stealing camerawork over carefully coded costumes (whose theme might be “shades of grey”) and an eclectic soundtrack. It’s never a dull moment in Guadagnino’s world, if only we knew what parts to focus on. As the initial half of the film is preoccupied with establishing Maggie and Hank’s conflicting narratives, early glimpses of Alma’s repressive nature seem at first like a distraction. It doesn’t help that what little emotional processing she does happens against her will, through a string of increasingly random encounters pushing her to confront her own psyche without changing her ways. 

After the Hunt is actually concerned more with generational divides than a battle of the sexes, though the film guards this fact like one of Alma’s secrets. This perhaps explains the strange time warp affecting Guadagnino’s Yale, where people behave simultaneously like its 1970 and 2017. Alma’s generation grew up repressing their traumas—apparently in ways that even being married to a psychoanalyst can’t fix. For someone like Alma, who has strived to avoid entangling her private and professional lives, and grown accustomed to blaming herself for the setbacks in both, the entitled self-exposure of her students’ generation can feel maddening. But Alma depends on cigarettes and alcohol to make it through the day at a minimum, and turns to  harder substances as the stress ratchets up. 

This all reaches a head when, in an ending that feels both too hasty and neat, Alma is forced to confront her own past and admit that she shares things in common with Maggie. After making much stink about the spectral boogeyman of cancel culture ruining men’s lives, it’s a relief to find After the Hunt admitting that sexual violence is real and leaves trauma in its wake.Even if it once gave her the strength to shatter glass ceilings, Alma’s impulse to bury her pain is exactly what the #MeToo movement was created to counter. As soon as this lesson is imparted, the movie is over. For a film that clearly relishes the thought of inducing discomfort, After the Hunt returns us to a surprisingly safe space. 

A French cinema release date for After the Hunt is still to be announced.