Every progressive was primed to hate After the Hunt before the lights even came up. Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column dutifully calls it a “seething, anti-woke” movie, and Rolling Stone went as far as to imply that it is a MAGA movie in spirit. But no, Luca Guadagnino’s film is not a scathing #MeToo satire, even as many conservatives hoped it would be.
After the Hunt rejects the premise of the culture war game altogether. Julia Roberts plays Alma, a cold, exacting Yale philosophy professor seeking tenure whose life implodes when her favourite student — a queer black woman played by Ayo Edebiri — accuses a white middle-aged male colleague, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assault after he escorts her home from a party.
The “he-said, she-said” story bears some resemblance to the one-season Netflix show The Chair and the divisive Cate Blanchett film Tár. Like both, After the Hunt doesn’t reward the audience with easy takeaways about power, guilt, or justice in elite spaces. Indeed, there are diatribes about pampered students and the idiocy of “trigger-warning culture”, but they’re delivered by hypocritical academics blind to their own privilege inside the rotting ivory tower.
Meanwhile, the details of the alleged assault are left deliberately vague, but the movie hints that both Maggie and Hank could have plausibly made up their sides of the story. It just leaves the viewer with the discomfort of not knowing who, if anyone, is right or who to root for. In 2025, that makes it practically avant-garde.
Because we now watch movies as if they’re partisan manifestos — “Is it woke or anti-woke? Progressive or reactionary?” — many critics missed that After the Hunt ultimately isn’t about ripped-from-the-headlines hot takes on #MeToo or campus politics, but something older and more universal: moral incoherence. The Ivy League philosophy department setting matters. These characters live in the gap between the theories they espouse in their work and the lives they actually lead. The professors lecture on virtue and justice, yet their own ethics collapse under pressure. Alma delivers a lecture on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: “Foucault paints a picture of public torture performed to maintain the social contract,” she says, and then plays her own role in publicly torturing her colleagues to preserve her own reputation.
Her student, the new-generation, woke feminist archetype, wields a different vocabulary of justice, but with the same motivations of self-serving ambition and vanity. What Guadagnino captures isn’t one side triumphing over the other, but two moral languages talking past each other.
That tension, between second-wave and fourth-wave feminism, between idealism and power, is more interesting than the film’s detractors allow. Critics wanted a clear statement: either a brave stand against wokeness or a stirring defence of a particular brand of accountability for the “marginalised”. But After the Hunt is instead obsessed with what happens when moral philosophy becomes social performance — when the language of justice is fluently spoken but rarely lived. In that sense, it’s not an anti-woke movie at all, but a tragic one about the human tendency to mistake moral language for moral action.
Guadagnino’s bleak joke is that everyone in the film, and, by extension, in the audience, is a virtue signaller now, part of the virtual Panopticon that Roberts’s Alma lectures on. We — whether Left or Right — perform outrage, empathy, or solidarity on cue, and there’s endless noise about moral truth, but very little actual virtue.