{"id":209642,"date":"2025-10-18T21:24:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T21:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/209642\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T21:24:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T21:24:07","slug":"after-the-hunt-is-not-an-anti-woke-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/209642\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018After the Hunt\u2019 is not an anti-woke film"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every progressive was primed to hate After the Hunt before the lights even came up. Michelle Goldberg\u2019s New York Times column<\/a> dutifully calls it a \u201cseething, anti-woke\u201d movie, and Rolling Stone<\/a> went as far as to imply that it is a MAGA movie in spirit. But no, Luca Guadagnino\u2019s film is not a scathing #MeToo satire, even as many conservatives hoped it would be.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 a queer black woman played by Ayo Edebiri \u2014 accuses a white middle-aged male colleague, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assault after he escorts her home from a party.<\/p>\n

The \u201che-said, she-said\u201d story bears some resemblance to the one-season Netflix show The Chair and the divisive Cate Blanchett film T\u00e1r. Like both, After the Hunt doesn\u2019t 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 \u201ctrigger-warning culture\u201d, but they\u2019re delivered by hypocritical academics blind to their own privilege inside the rotting ivory tower.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Because we now watch movies as if they\u2019re partisan manifestos \u2014 \u201cIs it woke or anti-woke? Progressive or reactionary?\u201d \u2014 many critics missed that After the Hunt ultimately isn\u2019t 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\u2019s Discipline and Punish: \u201cFoucault paints a picture of public torture performed to maintain the social contract,\u201d she says, and then plays her own role in publicly torturing her colleagues to preserve her own reputation.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t one side triumphing over the other, but two moral languages talking past each other.<\/p>\n

That tension, between second-wave and fourth-wave feminism, between idealism and power, is more interesting than the film\u2019s 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 \u201cmarginalised\u201d. But After the Hunt is instead obsessed with what happens when moral philosophy becomes social performance \u2014 when the language of justice is fluently spoken but rarely lived. In that sense, it\u2019s not an anti-woke movie at all, but a tragic one about the human tendency to mistake moral language for moral action.<\/p>\n

Guadagnino\u2019s 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\u2019s Alma lectures on. We \u2014 whether Left or Right \u2014 perform outrage, empathy, or solidarity on cue, and there\u2019s endless noise about moral truth, but very little actual virtue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every progressive was primed to hate After the Hunt before the lights even came up. Michelle Goldberg\u2019s New…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":209643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49423,34214,96,26396,18737,2839,56,54,55,55308],"class_list":{"0":"post-209642","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-after-the-hunt","9":"tag-andrew-garfield","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-julia-roberts","12":"tag-luca-guadagnino","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom","17":"tag-woke"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}