{"id":200308,"date":"2025-10-09T14:22:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T14:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/200308\/"},"modified":"2025-10-09T14:22:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T14:22:07","slug":"julia-roberts-metoo-drama-is-100-ohhellno","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/200308\/","title":{"rendered":"Julia Roberts’ #MeToo Drama Is 100% #OhHellNo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tYou do not need to have attended Yale, or indeed any Ivy League university in any East Coast state, to recognize the archetype that is Hank Gibson. He\u2019s handsome, bearded, and young, though not nearly as young as the students who eagerly congregate around him, hanging on his every word. A philosophy professor at the esteemed institution of higher learning in New Haven, the gentleman is prone to using dialectical declarations and deep-cut quotes to make his disciples dizzy. \u201cHe\u2019s Hank,\u201d one character will note. \u201cEverybody loves Hank.\u201d His self-regard is high. His shirts are unbuttoned just a little too low. He\u2019s played by Andrew Garfield<\/a> in a way that you can practically smell the pheromones wafting off the screen.<\/p>\n

\n\tNor do you need to have logged time in stuffy, cluttered classrooms to clock who a character like Alma Imhoff is, either. A slightly older philosophy professor who\u2019s hoping to score tenure (though Hank is also in the running for a more permanent position within the department as well), she tends to bring more of an ice-queen vibe to the metaphorical party, and a kind of prison-warden authority to the literal parties she throws with her husband, a therapist named Frederik. Alma doesn\u2019t just lecture about Foucult\u2019s panopticon; she is the embodiment of that all-seeing, all-knowing theory. Her wardrobe is oversized-blazer\u2013heavy. Her vibe is please-try-not-to-bore-me-so-much. She\u2019s played by Julia Roberts<\/a> as if she was a role written for Meryl Streep that\u2019s now being played by Julia Roberts.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd \u2014 how it pains us to write this next paragraph, though not nearly as agonizing as it is to sit through the subject of it \u2014 you don\u2019t need to have seen thousands, or even dozens of movies to pick up on what After the Hunt is aiming to accomplish. (It opens in limited release on October 10th, and goes wide on October 17th.) A drama set among the intellectual elite that\u2019s designed for maximum chin-stroking provocation, complete with an opening credits style that will seem eerily familiar<\/a> to many, director Luca Guadagnino<\/a>\u2018s handwringer about campus politics and cancel culture is definitely a cautionary tale, as in we strongly caution you against seeing something this empty and enraging. The film looks like a million bucks, has a high pedigree of talent, and mistakes constant poking for conversation, endless buzzwords for a buffet of food for thought, incendiary hypotheticals for insight. The promise is the kind of quality button-pusher Hollywood used to make 50 years ago. The result is just old-fashioned cinematic fools\u2019 gold, in which sensationalistic blather poses as social commentary. It takes a lot of hard work and the perfect alignment of movie stars to make something this god-awful.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tIt begins at one of Alma\u2019s informal get-togethers, in which both professors and pupils try to gain favor with each other in between boozy bon mots. Per usual, Hank is holding court on the couch. Alma sits off to the side, quietly admiring his gift of gab; the two are close friends, though there\u2019s something about the way they\u2019re constantly touching each other, or the odd lingering in their hellos and goodbyes that suggests intimacy, illicit or otherwise. Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg<\/a>) observes everything with a sense of bemused, resigned bitterness. Their fellow faculty member, Dr. Kim Sayers (Chloe Sevigny<\/a>), trades looks and barbs with him. Every person is insufferable in their own unique way.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd then there is Maggie Resnick (et tu, Ayo Edebiri<\/a>?). She\u2019s a twentysomething doctoral student who\u2019s pining for Alma\u2019s approval. More than most, in fact \u2014 Frederik keeps throwing shade about how this bright young thing mimics his wife\u2019s gestures and mannerisms, and he thinks she may have romantic designs on her as well. If nothing else, she\u2019s alert to the changes in tone and topic in the room. Maggie also smiles tolerantly when Hank keeps his hand on her knee for a few beats too many, or leans in close during chats. At the end of the evening, Hank offers to walk her home. When they leave, Alma spies on them through the peephole in the door as they stumble out. Do we detect envy? Or maybe a sense of maternal protectiveness? Is she simply suffering from gastrointestinal stress?<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tActually, Alma does suffer from ulcers, which cause her extraordinary stomach pain and vomiting at inconvenient moments, and viewers to wonder not if but when such clumsy symbolic traits will be trotted out in the future. In any case, Maggie doesn\u2019t show up to class the next day. When Alma meets up with Hank later at the university tavern, he mentions that he believes this promising student has plagiarized a paper. She\u2019s shocked, or pretends to be. Later, Alma finds Maggie waiting for her outside her door, wet and shivering. It turns out that Maggie\u2019s nonbinary partner was out of town last night, so Hank came in for a nightcap after the party. Why not? He\u2019s Hank. Everybody loves Hank. And then: \u201cHe crossed a line.\u201d Maggie needs to say something to the administrators. Can she count on her mentor for her support?<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAyo Edebiri in \u2018After the Hunt.\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAmazon MGM Studios<\/p>\n

\n\tTo accuse or not to accuse, to corroborate or not to corroborate? Those are the questions of After the Hunt, and the reverberations will be as earthshaking as the volume of the ticking-clock score that Guadagnino occasionally employs for tension. Time is running out, it tells us, though admittedly not as fast as our patience once the dogmatic back and forth begins in earnest. It\u2019s a pity that, after an extraordinary run that\u2019s included the HBO series We Are Who We Are, Bones and All, Challengers, and Queer, the filmmaker has broken his winning streak. Nuance is not on the curriculum here, it seems, and while it\u2019s tempting to assign most of the blame to screenwriter Nora Garrett\u2019s checklist of a script \u2014 toxic males, complicit enablers, overly sensitive Gen Z types, grumpy Gen X-ers, and your basic anti-woke blowhards will get their boxes ticked \u2014 there are directorial decisions that seem fit only to confuse or enflame. Maybe constant cutaways to characters\u2019 hands during a key conversation is meant to illuminate what\u2019s not being said under all that talk, even if simply ends up being a lot of shots of actual handwringing. Maybe the purposefully ambiguous coda was concocted to prove some sort of Rashomon-style truth-is-subjective point. Maybe the annoyingly meta touch tacked on at the last second is supposed to be clever. We couldn\u2019t tell you.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tEverything feels staggeringly off in After the Hunt, from the tenor of the performances delivered by genuine screen talents to the hamfisted way each new revelation ups the facepalm factor by 10. Both Roberts and Garfield usually rise to challenges like this, but they\u2019re fighting against a tide of relitigated, torn-from-yesterday\u2019s-headlines bullet points. Not even Edebiri, who\u2019s great at giving you a lot with a little, can salvage a part in which a lot of cultural baggage yields extremely little real perception. Stuhlbarg admittedly steals every scene he\u2019s in, serving every line with a plate of cookies laced with arsenic, though you wonder if the only direction he received was: \u201cGood, now make it more arch.\u201d There\u2019s one particular plot turn late in the game, involving an incident from Alma\u2019s past, that will have you exercising extraordinary restraint from screaming at the screen. Which, to be fair, is different from the gales of laughter you\u2019ll experience when Alma, having hit rock bottom, must live through the worst thing a human being can fathom: They have an online Rolling Stone Culture section article written about them. You think we\u2019re kidding. Spoiler: We are not.<\/p>\n

\n\tA lot of this might have been forgivable, or at best recyclable as camp, if it weren\u2019t for a nagging concept at the center of this corrosive bit of work. The notion that cancel culture has run amuck, that some may feel entitled to hurl accusations that ruin lives, that certain agendas are always at play, and the kids today don\u2019t know how easy they\u2019ve got it \u2014 these are not new ideas, and have been used as talking points by conservatives and those who wish to make things \u201cgreat\u201d again ad nauseam. Yet somehow, it\u2019s the way that After the Hunt keeps suggesting that the reckoning around decades of power imbalances and sexual improprieties was simply a burning fever that needed to break, and that once cooler temperatures prevailed we\u2019d all be well again, feels downright offensive. This wants to be a #MeToo drama that forces you to confront both bigger-pictures assumptions and your own biases. Once all is shrieked and done, what\u2019s left is a faux-prestige screed that\u2019s 100-percent #OhHellNo! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You do not need to have attended Yale, or indeed any Ivy League university in any East Coast…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200309,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[60477,60478,49,48,98818,75,33245,60229,98819,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-200308","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-andrew-garfield","9":"tag-ayo-edebiri","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-canada","12":"tag-chloe-sevigny","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-julia-roberts","15":"tag-luca-guadagnino","16":"tag-michael-stuhlbarg","17":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}