My local cinema held an exclusive preview of After the Hunt tonight, with a zoom call Q&A straight after with the main man, director Luca Guadagnino. Not only is this a match made in heaven, but last year I had an opportunity to attend the same event for Anora with Sean Baker, negged myself out of it, and missed out on the chance to talk to the pre-eminent Best Picture and Best Director Oscar winner. I won’t make the same mistake twice, so let’s commence the hunt.
And here’s the chase; I’m cutting straight to it – the first half of this movie’s plot is dog water. Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri) comes to tell her university professor, Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), that she’s been sexually assaulted by another lecturer, Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield). And Alma does nothing. Alma, follow this accusation up, immediately; don’t go inside for reheated casserole and hope it all blows over! I started to question myself, asking if my own thinking was too black and white on the matter, or if there is another way to address assault allegations that involves caution and time to gather everyone’s stories over a couple day period; and I decided the answer is no. It’s like Alma is sitting on the fence and exudes annoyance about the whole thing. Lady, you don’t know what happened, so sit on that fence proudly! Moreover, Hank is a dumb-dumb too, innocent or not, because not only is going up to a student’s apartment for a nightcap a strained abuse of power, but he puts himself in a situation where lies can be told, even after he suspects Maggie is capable, if she did plagiarise her paper, as he believes. From there, this movie plays out like a generic he-said/she-said spat for a while, with predictably dramatic elevation, under a thinky sheen of intellectual gender politics. I’m reminded of Notes on a Scandal, also in a school setting, but where the raw human turmoil of the plot bursts through any semblance of our shared social structures, drenched in all its ugliness and lust. But this movie wants to keep its events contained, as if suffocated by a thinky-thoughty identity-ridden modern academic Tupperware. All the characters’ actions are uncouth, where there isn’t a single person to root for underneath all the success. Maggie probably gets the most sympathy (and deserves it, as the victim), outwardly stating how she’s confused as to why Alma won’t support her, and by relaying how the newspaper reporter is more excited to gain a bigger reach than to deal with the very real abuse of her subject. But then, Maggie also relates a lot back to race, as is her chosen lens, while I don’t see why that’s always relevant. I exclaimed “boom!” when Alma calls out psychiatrist Dr. Kim Seyers (Chloë Sevigny) for casually breaking patient confidentiality repeatedly in the bar – another player under a slime of improper behaviour… but then Alma apologizes 🤯 I started to hypothesize that we might find out that Kim, Maggie and Hank are all in on a prank, setting up Alma like we’re in some sort of Michael Douglas style The Game, all in the name of studying Alma’s “virtue ethics”, as Maggie puts it – her area of study. But what an indictment on your movie, that I’m suggesting that every character has to be deliberately acting disingenuously for all this to make sense. Then, when Maggie translates the German article about Alma’s past life, I thought maybe this movie would prove to be about generational trauma, and how the misfortune has scarred Alma to be cold, in turn, in responding to Maggie; not that we haven’t seen that basic idea explored a few times before 🙄 If this had been the case, then the movie would have continued to suck, but just from a different angle.
But I hope you’ve kept reading, because there’s a third avenue, and the movie clicked into place for me as soon as we find out why the ticking we’ve been hearing, and how it relates to Alma’s tenure. While just before this, comes the scene where Alma asks her small class of three a philosophical question, and I leaned forward in my chair, waiting to see if any answer could offer anything in the realm of overarching meaning behind these jarring proceedings. If you’ll remember, the class pauses, and Alma answers her own question, about fitting into a just world in opposition to the “other”. The girl sitting across from Alma provides some push back, and they get into it. But then, after Alma is denied tenure she lets loose, and I realise that the reason Alma has been so unresponsive to the events around her – the sexual allegations, and her husband’s affection – is because she has been running out the clock to the time when she gets her tenure. The question Frederik (Michael Stulhbarg) asks at the beginning of the movie, about whether Alma or Hank see that their tenure will change anything, snaps directly into focus, and for Alma it’s clear, it is more than the next plateau of vocational achievement, but a marker of personal success she needs to hope will resolve what past demons swirl within her. To her, that non-political “other” that challenges us, as mentioned in her class, is everyone, everything that is in the way of her tenure. She has been coy about Maggie’s allegations, because it’s in her way – she sees the two affected parties going through the motions, and she is planned not to swerve into them. She knows Maggie plagiarized her paper, and she knows that detail won’t help Hank if confirmed. She knows Maggie is an average student, but what has mattered to Alma most is her affections, as probably Hank’s before, and Alma has kept them around like doting trinkets. And the accusation Hank makes at the party at the beginning, that the younger generation don’t speak as they’re afraid to offend somebody is Alma to a tee; but not because she’s afraid, but because she does not participate in the prevailing culture, or any culture; she is numb to the noise, outside her injured sense of self, and personal ambition.
For our four main poster performances are pretty wonderful, but I first want to make special mention of Michael Stulhbarg, who is effortless. To me, while it’s clear that the other three are acting, Stuhlbarg is like a real person, and I would assume that’s how he is naturally if I hadn’t seen him excel in different projects previously. I’ve said it before, but he is an exemplary actor – a true king of kings in the character space. And yes, there is a blurb out there that suggests Julia Roberts will win an Oscar for this performance, and due to the level of shading that’s eventually evident in this role, Alma does sit up in Robert’s pantheon with a spotlight. It’s truly in the Erin Brockovich and August: Osage County range, taking the inner determination from the former, and a sprinkle of the bitterness from the latter. Roberts did take home the trophy for Erin Brocovich, and I would hope she’s amongst it again. Andrew Garfield is serviceable, but not reaching near the heights of say, tick, tick… Boom! and The Social Network, which are still his standouts, right? Ayo Edebiri is growing, and I feel like this performance is understated in being pointedly annoying, immature, or obtuse, so she does a great job.
What to rate this movie? I always say that you have to wait until the end of a film to judge, and to see if it all makes sense, but never have I ever disliked a movie more at the start, only for it to reverse those feelings by the end. I now conclude that this movie is meant to be infuriating at the beginning, highlighting everyone’s hypocrisy or ignorance, only to illustrate how much Alma doesn’t care. I feel like a Hot Wheels car on a flimsy orange track with this movie, falling from a great height only for the purpose to use that momentum to complete a loopty-loop or something. After the Hunt does display what I love in masterful storytelling; deciding what information needs to be shared and at what time, leveraging the audience’s emotions deliberately for pay-off when it wants to give, and providing thought-provoking enclaves along the way. While Challengers was also excellent at that, it’s this movie’s story that is doing all the heavy lifting here, and the filmic technique merely hum along. I noticed shots of the character’s hands a lot, which I suppose are meant to indicate how the student and teacher pair are the same with their nail polish, or the manner in which they move. And there’s a clear attention-grabbing overhead shot as Frederik explains to his wife that it’s never okay for an adult to engage with a minor under any circumstance – as if that message was coming straight from God. Apart from that, there’s isn’t the directorial flare of Luca Guadagnino’s best work’s bum fluff, but I suppose the movie’s biggest accolade must go to recreating the set of Yale from scratch on a London stage. Although that’s somewhat lost on me, having never been to Yale to compare. Yet, on the whole, I commend After the Hunt completely. Similarly to Challengers, Guadagnino has been allured by another richly layered story and done a wonderful job bringing it into existence. To rank his movie from as far back as I go (I Am Love), I think I might put this as high as third, behind Call Me by Your Name and Challengers. And a hearty ranking needs a hearty rating.
4.5
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