After the Hunt spoilers follow.
Woke wars, feminism 'gone too far', #NotAllMen… cinema hasn't shied away from exploring some of today's most hot button topics. Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt is no exception. Starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield, it's a movie that asks viewers to think for themselves rather than telling them what they should think.
Roberts and Garfield play Alma and Hank, two Yale philosophy professors vying for tenure. Alma is married to Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) who can't help but notice how flirtatious Hank seems to be towards his wife. Then there's Maggie (Edebiri), Alma's favourite PhD student who may or may not harbour a crush on her charismatic professor.
Things are all very academic until a boozy party in Alma's home ends in the unthinkable. Maggie tearfully tells Alma that Hank "crossed a line" after he walked her home and asked for a nightcap. But if Maggie was hoping for unquestioning anger at Hank's behaviour, she's disappointed. Alma's sympathy is limited by a lack of undeniable evidence, her own relationship with Hank and her view of how women should expect to navigate the world.
After the Hunt is clear about the topics it's here to explore. In an early scene, Alma's student explains that he thinks she's likely to get tenure over Hank, what with women being in fashion right now.
Maggie's PhD is about virtue ethics, and how outward displays of moral character are seen as markers of morality. Then there are the many – perhaps too many – philosophical debates about right and wrong, truth and lies, power and accountability, laying bare the debates this movie wants to get to the heart of.
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But to call After the Hunt a #MeToo movie of he-said-she-said is to do it a disservice. Yes, this is a psychological thriller about consent, assault and abuse of power, but it raises provocative questions about who really holds privilege and the "feminist generation gap".
On first look, Maggie is a queer, Black student at Yale, a white, heteronormative institution. She is assaulted by her professor, a clear breach of professional boundaries and power dynamics. But Maggie is also wealthy, her family donating large sums of money to a school keen to keep them happy. According to Hank, she's just co-opting a shallow cultural moment in order to eliminate her favourite professor's tenure competition.
Then there's Alma, a woman who, despite decades of experience, is assumed to land a promotion purely because of her gender. She's no doubt faced her own discriminations and assault, as we find out further into the movie.
But instead of encouraging Maggie to report Hank, she instead seeks to try and manage her expectations, clearly uncomfortable when asked to testify about the night in question. Alma seems to want Maggie to have to suffer her way to the top, like she did, rather than help to make life easier for the generation of women below her.
Alma also repeatedly misgenders Maggie's non-binary partner, launches a tirade against one of her student's questions about the concept of the outsider and shouts at Maggie, "Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable".
She rails against Gen Z's woke trigger warnings, calling out Maggie's choice of partner and an apartment ten times cheaper than she can afford as attempts to be "interesting".
Is Alma entirely wrong? When it comes to how Maggie sees her own identity, probably not. After the Hunt presents audiences with complex and contradictory characters. Alma struggles to accept that Hank can be both a popular mentor and assaulter, her friend and a predator. Maggie can be simultaneously oppressed for her race and sexuality, but wealthy enough to grant her a fragile shield of privilege. Alma might be a feminist, but she's not so empathetic to the younger generation.
Speaking to Digital Spy, Edebiri described After the Hunt as "a fascinating mirror to what we don't always want to look at. The role of art is coming together to reflect to each other, and then we reflect to [the audience]. It's not always nice or comfortable."
On the ability to hold multiple truths at once, Garfield said the tragedy was that "we can do it. On a mass societal level, it's very, very hard right now. But in small, in-person communities, justice circles exist. In small groups, I think we are able to hold a lot of nuance and pain with each other, for each other."
In the final scene, we meet Maggie and Alma years after the incident, both women are happy – or pretending to be. Maggie didn't end up being "radioactive" in academia, as Alma warned her she would be after going public about the assault. Alma didn't lose her entire career, even after being caught forging prescriptions for pain medication. So who really won? Who got what they deserved?
After the Hunt isn't a movie with a moral or a message that it's telling you is the only 'right' one to take away – that much is left up to the audience to decide and it's the right call.
After the Hunt is out now in cinemas.
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Isabella is a freelance journalist who has written on young women's issues, entertainment, TV and film, South Asian representation, mental health, dating and so much more. She has bylines in ELLE, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Prima, Digital Spy, Women's Health, and Harper's Bazaar, and was named 30 Under 30 by MediaWeek, PPA and We Are The City. She was also shortlisted for Workplace Hero at the Investing In Ethnicity Awards and Hero of the Year at the European Diversity Awards. Follow Isabella on Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
