The post-stalking #MeToo campus thriller is a provocation for the sake of provocation | Luca Guadagnino

IIn theory, After the Hunt, director Luca Guadagnino’s psychological thriller that traces the fallout of a sexual assault accusation on an Ivy League campus, hinges on one early scene: Alma, a seductive, aloof philosophy professor made icily glowing by Julia Roberts, arrives home to find Maggie, the doctoral student she’s mentoring and played by the star Rookie Ayew Edebiri, waiting for her. Her in the rain.

Sitting together in an apartment stairwell—Guadagnino, an accomplished and elegant filmmaker, films them facing each other as negative images mirrored in a neutral—the yin to yang for generations—Maggie tells Alma in terse, digressive passages that something bad has happened with Hank (Andrew Garfield), a frequent professorial colleague who serves as Alma’s professional rival, friend, and perhaps lover. The two had left Alma’s house the night before after an evening of drinking and going on relentless provocations about how abusing someone had become a “prime and eminent sin,” or how “the common enemy was chosen as the straight, white, cis male.” Maggie says that after a nightcap at her apartment, Hank “crossed the line.”

This is the point one might expect, based on the few post-#MeToo films that have used ellipses to convey the shameful horrors of sexual assault, or the dominance of the so-called shock plot in contemporary novels, or even just the recent memory of a similar scene of immediate aftermath in Eva Victor’s brilliant drama Sorry, Baby, that Maggie would stumble upon the details of the abuse, or the trauma The narcotic, or disorienting free fall of consequences. But Edbury, as critic Justin Chang has noted, seems directed to play Maggie as if she were lying—wide-eyed, tense, evasive, and perhaps even, in trying to reach Alma’s hand, overtly manipulative. (We’ve already seen her rifle enter Alma’s bathroom and steal what amounts to clippings from Chekhov’s old newspaper.) This scene of revelation—the first account of what happened—plays not as a confession, but as a test of loyalty to Alma, a test that the guide, cold, clinical, and dismissive, fails miserably.

It also seems to be a false test of loyalty for the viewer: Do you believe Maggie, because you feel you should? Do you trust the story? Watching this scene, I felt a pull of tedium, the same feeling I get whenever anyone mentions the phrase “cancel culture” seriously. It made me a little irritated to make certain assumptions: that I would interpret a scene through a blind “believe all women” lens, that I would criticize a film for calling such slogans into question, and that I would feel offended on some level. The point of this scene, in this campus drama about generational divisions and reputational warfare, is not to illuminate a particular experience or action; It is a politicized reaction. As the head of the philosophy department at ALMA put it, lamenting the increasingly charged world of academia: “Against all odds, I found myself in the field of optics, not substance.”

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a film to do, especially one that concerns a claim that often hinges on the trustworthiness of the person coming forward, and the extent to which they can make their case in the court of public opinion. A better film would have treated this scene as a hand grenade launched at Yale’s philosophy department, examining the strange and disturbing complexities that arise when inherently unverifiable testimony meets arbitrary procedures, when personal loyalties challenge moral stances and when skepticism collides with conviction—what the campus response to sexual assault might be like, during that brief period between the rise of… #MeToo is now entrenched, the mainstream reaction.

Instead, it treats After the Hunt, written by debut screenwriter Nora Garrett and polished by Guadagnino into a modern period piece (set primarily in 2019, though its topical references stretch back to the 2000s), like a pinball, flinging Maggie’s ill-defined claims down a series of hot third bars. What if, as Hank claims, Maggie stole her thesis, and he was about to expose her? What if she is, in fact, the queer black version of the second word (billionaire, major donor to Yale; since the majority of Ivy League nepo kids are overwhelmingly white, this detail seems particularly contrived to raise the idea that marginalized identity confers unearned or undeserved privilege). What if a crowd of protesters, led by her non-binary partner, swarmed Alma for answers? What if she was actually an average student?

However, After the Hunt rehearses not Maggie, but Alma, whom Roberts imbues with a magnetic mystique that manages to form an ironic vortex through a host of provocations—sexual assault allegations, Brett Kavanaugh’s pleas for compassion, “cancel culture,” managerialism, and Generation Shaped by the #MeToo movement — Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry, Darling, and Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice — prioritized fatal trauma over character to make a point. In those cases, there was some variation on the phrase “misogyny is a horror drug.” In After the Hunt, as the director and stars reiterated at a high-profile press tour, the goal is to get people talking.

It doesn’t work — the film grossed $1.6 million domestically in its opening weekend. This is a confluence of factors beyond the film’s control — not that it arrives as a relic of the late Biden era at a time when college campuses are under full ideological assault from the Trump administration — but partly because provocation for provocation’s sake is not an attractive trick. After the Hunt is, like all of Guadagnino’s films, elegant, intoxicating and inviting, in the way that prestigious, mahogany-walled rooms can be; It’s also hollow, a cacophony of resonant signifiers like Foucault’s panopticon, Rolling Stone shows, and “this shallow cultural moment.” Spoilers ahead: It’s never made clear what actually happened between Hank and Maggie, nor what Maggie accuses him of, as if that doesn’t make a difference; It is revealed that Hank was right about Maggie’s plagiarism but is also responsible for not stopping at “no”; Weakened by illness, Alma confesses to her husband Fredrik (Michael Stuhlbarg) that she had an affair when she was 15 with her father’s friend, then fabricated rape allegations to punish him when his interests went awry. That she was a child, Frederick argues, seems like a weak consolation; The focus remains on the destruction of emotions that have been inappropriately weaponized, as it is revealed that everyone is horribly in danger.

I do not believe, as some have claimed, that this amounts to “reactionary centrism,” a style of politics that prioritizes neutrality while over-cataloging the excesses of the left wing. To call it that is to ascribe too much ideological logic to a film that’s primarily about getting excited by young age buzzwords. Nor is it a crime of “confused politics”—films reflect people, and people are always a jumble of contradictions, idiosyncrasies, patterns, and histories that are never quite coherent. Rather, it reads as an honest reflection of “cancel culture” – a misnomer for a concept that is always inflated, never faithfully invoked, and is at once too broad and too inflexible: a concept that is largely unfounded and whose meaning depends on the user, often in the form of a perversion. Like many of the online discourse cycles that clearly inspired the film’s twists, After the Hunt has the stale taste of something reverse-engineered to push buttons, an inorganic polemic manufactured to pass off as sensationalistic. (See, in the Taste of Anger collection, the recent controversy over Sidney Sweeney’s jeans.)

To be fair, it’s very difficult to translate the internet craze to the big screen – Todd Field’s brilliant film Tár, also about a domineering, icy and amazingly vulnerable woman, was one of the few to seamlessly weave a “cancel culture” strand into it, by digging deep into said woman’s amazingly vulnerable psyche. After the chase, despite a brilliant performance by Roberts, he, like many bearers of “cancel culture,” settles for a facsimile of self-satisfied argument. For a film described as “not everything is supposed to make you uncomfortable,” it seems pretty sappy.