“It happened at Yale” says the opening of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, which seems a little superfluous given that the director plunges us straight into a smug, well-heeled cocktail party for academics, complete with airy, pretentious chatter about the likes of Foucault and Kierkegaard. If that — and a title font that echoes Woody Allen’s go-to choice of white Windsor Light Condensed over a black background — sets anti-intellectual alarm bells ringing, then this might not be the film for you. But though its conversations about tenure can be a chore, its presentation of the modern campus as the Somme — in terms of the battleground for progressive politics — does strike a very timely chord. It’s also Julia Roberts’ best work in a long, long time, a superb feat of casting that genuinely sends shivers and may well bury that old America’s Sweetheart image for good.
Her chic, killer wardrobe alone does a lot of the talking. She plays Alma Imhoff, a professor of philosophy, and she literally takes her work home with her, inviting staff and students alike to her nightly salons where issues such as collective morality and performative discontent are vigorously debated. A very vocal participant is her close friend and colleague Henrik “Hank” Gibson (Andrew Garfield), who very much shares Alma’s views on life in the social media age (“When did offending someone become the pre-eminent cardinal sin?” she wonders aloud). Representing the student body is Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), an inquiring mind who is clearly besotted with Alma.
While the elders discuss the now-besmirched personal lives of the likes of Carl Schmitt, Hegel and Heidegger, Maggie goes looking for the bathroom, and in her quest to find a fresh toilet roll finds, instead, a mysterious envelope. Its contents are viewed only fleetingly but it appears to contain a photograph and a newspaper cutting. Maggie puts everything back bar the cutting, which she puts in her pocket before returning. (The contents of this mysterious envelope may or may not be the catalyst for what happens next.) Anyway, after bidding her guests a good night, Alma catches sight of Maggie and Hank leaving together, the latter clearly the worse for wear but in seemingly high spirits.
Alma thinks nothing of it, until Maggie — who is gay and lives with her non-binary lover Alex (Lio Mehiel) — comes to her apartment, with a story to tell. Hank, she claims, came to her apartment, became aggressive, and sexually assaulted her. When Alma confronts him, Hank denies this and becomes defensive, echoing a guest’s assertion the night before — “The common enemy has been chosen, and it is the straight, white, cis man” — by painting himself the victim of Maggie’s prim, over-sensitive boundary issues in what he calls “this shallow cultural moment”.
Though the issue is simple enough — did he, or didn’t he? — it becomes an almost Brechtian challenge for Alma, who is torn along so many lines, primarily wanting to defend her friend but also maintain her professional composure and intellectual rigor. The fact that Maggie is Black, and rich, is a secondary powder keg that will blow up later in the story, when the firings start, the litany of cancellations pile up, and recriminations ricochet through the building. Needless to say, the shadow of David Mamet’s notorious 1992 play Oleanna is everywhere, but Guadagnino — working from a script by Nora Garrett — gives his story a more generously female-weighted sense of balance.
The excesses of political correctness — and in particular the perverse right asserted by left-wing youth to stifle anything they don’t agree with — gets a very firm and sometimes wickedly funny drubbing, especially when Alma is at the end of her tether with Maggie. (Indeed, there’s a very entertaining gag about embattled British rock star Morrissey.) But though it bites, After the Hunt isn’t just a diatribe about “woke” culture, it’s a genuine attempt to look at what’s happening now and see where it might take us. Maybe the academic elite deserves to be taken down, with its mealy mouthed hypothesizing and bourgeois fetishization of education as something somehow “better” than knowledge.
It won’t be a watercooler movie in that respect, and it may be a shock to unwary audiences lured in by Roberts’s star wattage. But it could mark another milestone for the actress, being her strongest role since 2000’s Erin Brockovich and an astonishing performance in its very own right. Lars Von Trier, eat your heart out.
Title: After The Hunt
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenwriter: Nora Garrett
Cast: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny
Sales: Amazon MGM Studios, Sony Pictures Releasing International
Running time: 2 hrs 19 mins