Julia Roberts’ new movie arrives a decade late.

This article contains spoilers for After the Hunt.

After the Hunt starts the way any serious movie about academia should: with Julia Roberts decked out in a white suit hosting a dinner of philosophy professors and their star pupil students in her parlor. The academic elites are quoting Kierkegaard while speaking on the human condition. But that’s just about where the film’s met expectations end. The latest picture from beloved director Luca Guadagnino follows a Yale professor, Alma (Roberts), as she gets caught in the middle of a sexual assault allegation that her favorite student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), launches against her closest male colleague, Hank (Andrew Garfield). After the Hunt is intended to be a thought-provoking film that debates the existence of cancel culture and the way today’s thick political climate affects how we view identity and claims of misconduct. But, in 2025, we’re far beyond simply bringing these ideas to the fore and stuffing them full of A-listers. People have been ranting about the nonexistence of cancel culture and turning the politically correct into “snowflakes” for years. After the Hunt is, perhaps bravely, a movie about gray areas. But it is so worried about landing in the muck of today’s stickiest discourses that it becomes a muddied gray area itself.

After the Hunt starts with a warning—a loud, incessant, nondiegetic ticking sound, playing over shots of Alma walking through campus. Lest there be any confusion, a metaphorical bomb will eventually explode. When we first meet our cast of intellectual elites, though, it’s through the eyes of Maggie, who is staring, disaffected, at the African figurines on display in Alma’s living room. Alma looks on as Hank negs Maggie—a wealthy Black lesbian student—and grabs her thigh while making sweeping generalizations about the younger generation. Maggie protests in little ways, chiding these generalizations and laughing off the crossed physical boundary. Alma’s husband, a psychiatrist named Frederik (played by the always great Michael Stuhlbarg), brings up the elephant in the room: Both Alma and Hank are up for the same tenured spot in the department. Despite a small number of nonsensical details—the 57-year-old Roberts playing a character still up for tenure, for one—the chess pieces are clearly set.

The audience never sees what happens later that night. But Maggie soon confides in Alma that Hank, who was increasingly intoxicated and handsy as the night went on, sexually assaulted her after he walked her home. For the rest of the film, the audience follows only Alma as she struggles to ride the line between supporting Maggie and taking a stand against her close friend for an incident she has no proof of.

On one hand, the movie seems to want to agree with critics of today’s oft-infantalized Gen Z: Maggie is a mediocre student who skates by because of her adoration of professors who are weak enough to fall for it. But it reneges at every point as well, portraying the ways in which Maggie, who is suspected of exploiting her identity for personal gain, is also exploited. She fights for credibility while the academic overlords experience a tug-of-war between what to believe and what they feel they must believe, because the optics of questioning a young Black lesbian are just too bad to risk even asking unbiased questions about the situation. Instead, everyone in Maggie’s orbit would rather wipe their hands clean of the mess. In their pursuit of handling the situation in an acceptable way, Maggie’s trusted confidants think only of how they will come out unscathed, rather than whether their student is all right.

This is not a discourse that’s ever been had before, of course. People haven’t been railing against the false boogeyman of cancel culture for years while Chris Brown sells out stadiums and Woody Allen continues to make films. And they certainly haven’t debated whether we need to #BelieveWomen. After the Hunt’s failure is not in bringing up these tired questions, but in failing to say something meaningful or interesting about them. The film’s first ending shows Alma forced to leave the school—not for anything to do with Maggie and Hank, but because she was caught forging prescriptions for pain meds. In an epilogue, we learn she was made dean of the philosophy department, having somehow secured the position despite committing a felony and with only a few years of tenure under her belt. Hank, meanwhile, is off to obscurity. Are either of these outcomes fair? After the Hunt can’t decide. Maybe bringing these questions up would feel more apt if the movie was released five to 10 years ago. But we’ve been living inside of this discourse for too long to simply start a conversation and leave it at that.

It doesn’t help that the plot is more obvious than it lets on. The movie is built around the idea that the audience doesn’t know whether Maggie is lying about the assault, but it seems clear to me that Hank assaulted Maggie, just as much as it seems clear that both Hank and Frederik are right about Alma ignoring Maggie’s mediocrity. That Maggie would use her connections and her identity to get ahead is as much a given as it is that a young woman desperate for Alma’s approval could be an easy victim for a sly man who gets high on his own intellect. This is hammered home in a scene where Hank scarfs down Indian cuisine while attempting to make his case for what happened that night to Alma, much to the detriment of anyone with misophonia. In the film’s final moments, Hank’s true nature is so much as proven, even if we never get an official admission of guilt. This movie about the complexity of power dynamics and agency—in which the characters are scholars in the exact discipline that analyzes the complexity of man—can’t hold space for the complexity of people to be annoying and opportunistic as well as prey. If these are to be the thought leaders of this generation and the next: We’re done for.

The largest misstep in After the Hunt comes at the question of cost. If you’re going to make a movie that wades in the murk of the changing perception of what it means to be Black, queer, and/or femme in spaces that traditionally have excluded these groups, if you’re going to make a movie exploring whether hegemony has become so sympathetic to these minorities that it can actually be advantageous to be one, if you’re going to make a movie about this backlash to woke-ism, then you better not miss. You better incur the risk for something.

At the center of this movie is an oversimplification of a Black queer woman. Alma calls Maggie out for trying too hard to assimilate to her white colleagues and those with less money than her (best-evidenced by the truly horrendous wig Edebiri dons throughout the entire movie). Alma and Hank see through Maggie’s attempts to shape-shift into someone more relatable, sure, but if Maggie’s worst crimes are mediocrity and coming from money, then more of Alma and Hank’s colleagues would be guilty than their students of color. Alma launches these criticisms while living in a beautiful home with a top-tier sound system and kitchen any Ina Garten disciple would kill for, plus owning an apartment on the side. (Let’s assume Frederik’s psychiatrist salary is keeping their living room, an ode to the Socratic method, afloat, considering Alma hasn’t yet secured tenure.) Remind me: What’s rule No. 1 about casting stones?

She’s One of the Best Actresses in Comedy. Her Intense New Movie Might Make Her an Oscar Nominee.

This Year’s Most Terrifying Best Picture Contender Is Part Rashomon, Part Zero Dark Thirty

How the Least Talented Spice Girl Managed to Become the Most Successful Member

After All These Years, This Song Is Still Taylor Swift’s Masterpiece

A less savory, but perhaps braver movie, would have dared to make Maggie the villain. Or, it would have at least followed her for a bit and tried to understand her. This movie only tries to understand Alma—in a truly great performance from Roberts—which would work if the situation Alma was caught up in actually had much to do with her. But Alma wasn’t there; to Maggie’s dismay, she says as much. So what, then? Is this a movie about allyship? Because a basic tenet of allyship is not to expect it from the people who have the most power over you.

It’s not like good movies about this quagmire haven’t been made. Cinephiles will remember the widespread love for Tár, Todd Field’s 2022 film in which Cate Blanchett portrays a gay female classical conductor whose illustrious and dominant career is threatened by allegations that arise when her former mentee takes her own life. Tár was so deft because it was punching up. After the Hunt enters the ring but doesn’t throw a single punch at all.

Guadagnino’s failure to reach this mountaintop feels surprising, especially given the film’s star-studded cast. But Guadagnino specializes in a feeling of timelessness, and this is a movie so intent on being pegged to the times that it actually feels behind them. In this pursuit, nothing about the film is subtle. And yet, despite its heavy-handedness—best exemplified by the literal ticking noises—you will leave wondering what it was trying to say. Which raises an even bigger question: Can we afford that kind of ambiguity?

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.