The opening credits to Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” all but scream that this is the Italian director making his version of a Woody Allen movie, with its black background and white title cards in an Allenesque serif font, all the actors listed in big groups rather than individually and even a Tony Bennett and Bill Evans standard playing on the soundtrack. And then the film itself gets past its prologue and spends its first extended sequence — the first 15 minutes or so — following the dynamics of a group of educated East Coasters whose idea of party chat is philosophical arguments while casually dropping words like teleological.
It’s not a movie Woody Allen would have made – for one thing, it’s set on the Yale campus, not the Upper East Side – but it’s a milieu he would recognize, at least for a while.
But “After the Hunt,” which premiered on Friday at the Venice Film Festival prior to its October release from Amazon MGM Studios, is every inch a film by Guadagnino, who has become a magnet for top stars with a string of films that include “Call Me by Your Name,” “Challengers” and “Queer.” Utterly stylish and insistently twisty, it takes an array of the hot-button issues that surface on college campuses – race, privilege, power dynamics, sexual politics and all-purpose wokeness – and examines them in a way designed to provoke rather than explain.
The hostess of that opening party is Julia Roberts’ Alma Imhoff, an almost-tenured professor in the philosophy department who seems to have special relationships with overly charming fellow professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) and PhD student Maggie Resnick (a fiery Ayo Edebiri), who’s constantly described as working on a brilliant dissertation on “virtue ethics,” but whom Alma’s cranky husband Frederik Mendelssohn (Michael Stuhlbarg) dismisses as mediocre.
“Maggie is brilliant,” says Alma to her husband as the party winds down. “Is she?” he answers. “Or does she just think that you’re brilliant?”
In “After the Hunt,” questions like that are brought up to hang in the air. But the biggest question detonates the day after the party, when a trembling Maggie shows up at Alma’s door and says that Hank walked her home after the party and then sexually assaulted her. Hank vehemently denies that anything but flirtation happened, and says Maggie is trying to get back at him because he discovered that she plagiarized large chunks of her “brilliant” dissertation.
For Hank, Maggie’s accusation results in his immediate firing, a catastrophe for a professor who thought he too was on the verge of tenure. Both he and Maggie blame Alma for not taking their side more forcefully, while Alma is clearly trying to avoid any misstep while also dealing with some sort of undisclosed trauma from her earlier life.
If Guadagnino’s tennis movie “Challengers” found its actors doing a lot of serving and volleying, this one is more of the same, but all verbal. The people we meet in the Yale community seem to use argument as their default mode of conversation in the classroom and in the coffee shop, and the current campus climate means that every heated statement is a potential career-ending transgression.
It’s very civilized but very messy, and people tiptoe around in an environment where everyone is looking to take offense. “I hope you will not allow what is correct to keep you from doing what is right,” says Hank one moment, while a friend on the faculty tells Alma, “It’s a minefield these days. A f–king minefield.” And when a bar near campus plays The Smith’s “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” a teacher nods and says, “brave,” as if playing a song from the ideologically impure Morrissey takes courage.
A loudly clicking clock intrudes on the soundtrack every so often, ratcheting up the tension, but Guadagnino also makes a point of backing off. For long stretches of the film, the cameras of legendary cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed keep the characters at a distance as to not obscure their faces in shadow. Close-ups will come, sometimes off-kilter, but often as not there’s a murkiness around these characters, virtually all of whom are mean, needy and resentful at one point or another.
Face it: Between the pampered, touchy rich kids and the snobby academics, “After the Hunt” does not make a strong case for moving to New Haven – though all those delicious moral dilemmas and snarky one-liners are a good reason for actors to continue to flock to Guadagnino.
Meanwhile, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ music morphs with every twist and turn; it can consist of stately piano-based melodies at one point, and then lurch into strangled woodwinds the next. When Alma vomits in the toilet, each heave gets its own brass flourish from the composers, who are clearly hired to be active participants and know just how much abrasive astringency it’ll take to do the job.
And while this becomes a talky thriller of sorts, words like suspense imply a moment when the suspense will be lifted. But it’s not that simple for Guadagnino, his characters or his audience; revelations do arrive, but the central question about what happened between Hank and Maggie is never answered, not even in an epilogue set “five years later,” in a time when DEI programs are being dismantled.
Like most of Guadagnino’s movies, “After the Hunt” is very stylish and a lot of fun in a serious kind of way; it’s also a little arch and very self-aware, which the director admits with the last line of the film. The end credits may go back to looking like Woody, but the feel you’re left with is definitely Luca.
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