After the Hunt (2025)

Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt arrives as a campus accusation drama set at Yale in 2019, which is to say it arrives pre-loaded with every anxiety the prestige film industry has been nursing since the hashtag era began. Julia Roberts plays Alma, a philosophy professor whose star doctoral student Maggie, played by Ayo Edebiri, accuses a colleague of sexual assault. The screenplay, by Nora Garrett, was voted onto the Black List, and Guadagnino rewrote the accuser's race, changing Maggie from white to Black to add a layer of subtext the first draft lacked. The film then declines to do much with it. The accusation is believed by some, doubted by others, and the question of who gets credence on an elite campus hovers at the edge of the frame without ever being brought into focus.

The progressive furniture is arranged with care. Maggie has a non-binary partner named Alex, played by Lío Mehiel, and Alma hurls the relationship back at her as performative during a confrontation, which is the film's way of acknowledging that it knows the vocabulary and intends to use it as a weapon. The #MeToo machinery is the engine of the plot, and the institutional handling of a woman who comes forward is examined at length. There is a glancing swipe at academic privilege and the wealthy donor class, and Hank's late pivot to a lucrative political consultancy gets a raised eyebrow. But the film refuses verdicts. It is a conversation piece that will not finish the conversation, and critics found the follow-through coy.

Roberts is superb, and the film around her is muddled, overlong, and finally toothless in a way that feels almost studied. It gestures at race, gender, and power, then retreats into ambiguity as though ambiguity were a virtue and not a hiding place. The result is a provocation that declines to provoke. One leaves the theater admiring the craftsmanship and wondering what, exactly, was being hunted. The answer appears to be nothing in particular.