These days it’s not about what’s true or right, it’s about what won’t get you cancelled.
The first provocation of what’s ultimately an exceptionally provocative film is the white text on black screen that reads ‘it happened at Yale’. The suggestion of a truthful account is always titillating – we like it when we’re given the directive to think something could’ve happened to us – and though After the Hunt is not true, it’s the set-up, the playful lie, that gets this film rolling before anyone enters the scene.
Alma (Julia Roberts) is a Professor of Philosophy, who invites her students over for fancy, intellectual gatherings where domestic help is employed, hardback books become pot holders for enormous tarts and everyone overdrinks. It’s all very culturally aesthetic, but what’s unmissable is the way her closest friend and colleague, Hank (Andrew Garfield of Spider-Man film series fame) lounges on her couch, legs spread and feet on cushions, as if his relationship with Alma affords him the world, when in fact it’s his privileged white, cis-male status that does. And this is where the conversation goes: Hank’s privilege and that of those who came before him. Since both he and Alma are awaiting a decision on their tenure, it’s topical. The question of whether or not women are now the privileged ones is countered, and won’t Alma get tenured precisely because of it? We’ve heard these arguments before and they’re never comfortable for women or for persons of colour, who are also miscast as the favoured ones.
After one such evening, Hank leaves with Maggie (The Bear’s Ayo Edibiri),a Black PhD student, who, the following day, tells Alma that he assaulted her. The question does not become a did-he-or-didn’t-he one, but rather one of whose side should Alma take regardless of what the truth is.
Italian director Luca Guadagnino is known for his films depicting extreme privilege and dramatically blurred ethics (A Bigger Splash, Call Me By Your Name) so he’s in his element, catering to a soft kind of social thriller. In the course of 139 minutes, he deep-dives into ambition, obsession, love and deceit, wokeism, retribution and Hannah Arendt. There’s a lot going on, and either all of it, or possibly none of it, hinges on the concept of truth.
Roberts is impressively steely-eyed and frigid, with a penchant to perform warmth, while Garfield is suitably obnoxious as Hank (do we care if he assaulted Maggie when we’re so eager to blame him for his entitlement?). Edibiri’s Maggie is part-confused / part-in-control as the maybe-assault survivor / potential instigator, and she inhabits these binaries fluidly, sliding with ease into the genre. Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man) as Alma’s husband Frederik is a fairly minor character whose job, it would seem, is to support his wife, but his movement through the advantageous space that an older, white, educated, heterosexual male takes up is too interesting to rest in the realm of sidekick. He literally dances in and out of rooms and in and out of conversations, so frustratingly poised and sure of himself that he’d be ridiculous if his position wasn’t so enviable. Like all of the characters in the film, even Chloë Sevigny’s role as a student councillor and Alma’s friend is no cardboard cutout – she’s equally sympathetic and fraudulent. The multifaceted characterisation is satisfyingly complex and, thanks to Nora Garrett’s debut script, the film’s plot is constantly moving, but it’s this awful recognition of us in them that raises the stakes in After the Hunt. What would we do?
Reviewed by Heather Taylor-Johnson
