Luca Guadagnino had a fantastic 2024. It doesn't often happen anymore that a director releases two movies in a single year to the quality of both Challengers and Queer, but he did it. And that two-punch appears to be just the start of a momentum he is riding high. His name has been prospectively attached to a new version of Lord of the Flies and a remake of American Psycho, his next project is going to be the Sam Altman movie -he is one of the busiest filmmakers in Hollywood right now. But the pedigree his name has carried may be in jeopardy and his run of triumph ended if After the Hunt is any indication.
Maybe his successes have gotten to him, maybe this movie is just demonstrative of contentious proclivities that were always there but have gone unnoticed, or maybe he just needed writer Justin Kuritzkes -who penned both of last years’ films- more than we realized (this script is credited to one Nora Garrett), but for the first time it really feels like the Italian director has bitten off more than he can chew in this attempt of a nuanced discourse on American academia, privilege, campus "identity politics" and sexual assault accountability.
The film follows a cast of exclusively unlikable characters. Julia Roberts is the centrepiece as Alma Imhoff, a philosophy professor at Yale recently returned from a medical leave. She has a very friendly relationship with grad student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), the daughter of highly influential university donors, who idolizes her and shares many of her intellectual convictions. Alma considers her her best student, even though peers around her take note of Maggie’s thesis being apparently plagiarized. After a party, Maggie is taken home by Hank (Andrew Garfield), a younger professor with a predilection for flirting with students and who has been an on-again off-again affair for Alma, and a couple days later Maggie turns up to Alma with allegations that Hank sexually assaulted her. The blow-back from this, including Maggie going public and Hank being fired -both of whom putting pressure on Alma to be on their side of the matter- causes Alma, who has a reputation as a feminist, considerable strain and frustration -much of which she directs at Maggie and the socio-sexual politics of her generation.
There is a great character from recent cinema history whom Alma reminds me of -Lydia Tár, who likewise is a figure of feminist esteem and confident intellectual authority with a condescending attitude towards the younger generation and their form of progressive politics. Tár was a perpetrator of sexual abuse herself and Alma is not, but she does have demons in the closet that inform her sensitivities around these issues. More importantly though, while Todd Field used a sequence of Tár putting down an argument on the Euro-centrism of music history to speak to her sense of pompous grandiloquence, Guadagnino uses a similar beat for the far more humble Alma to seemingly vent irritation towards young people inserting social consciousness into everything. And it's not that the points Alma makes in context are necessarily unpersuasive, but their tenor suggests a rather petty callousness towards the politics of young people more broadly.
Guadagnino sets a bit of a debate stage early, when at the party Alma and Maggie together challenge a male student's supposition of a culture of discrimination towards white men, rebuking it sharply, though even as they do so, Guadagnino makes note of sceptical expressions from Hank or Alma's posh psychiatrist husband Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg). There is some assumption of bad faith Guadagnino asserts to every argument of the film -whether it is Hank trying to couch his denial of assault in the context of a feminist attitude towards the issue more broadly, Maggie invoking her race in relation to the politics of her assault, or a student attempting to read a philosophical complex from a modern socio-political lens. All are framed as innately disingenuous, especially through the script's use of frequent hyperbole and a lot of presumptive words and sentiments being put into each other's mouths for the sake of a harsher point.
Everyone in the film is fairly obnoxious, Guadagnino leaning into the snobbish stereotypes of the Ivy League. Apart from being brazenly hypocritical, Alma carries herself with a sense of superiority and constant impatience -which makes her a good match for the smugness of Hank, neither of whom seems to recognize or care about the power imbalance that exists between teachers and students. Passive-aggressive and sexually unsatisfied, Frederick -who begins the film rather objective and level-headed- has a habit of playing classical music at unreasonable volumes for no discernible purpose but to pester his wife or her guests. Chloë Sevigny’s Kim, the university psychiatrist, is consistently bored and lacking in sympathy. And of course Maggie is entirely framed as a poser, downplaying her wealth and privilege and adopting progressive politics as an apparent pretense to fit in -it’s heavily implied she’s even dating a non-binary classmate just for this image (their identity something that is recurringly mocked). This characterization gives licence to cast Maggie’s account as unreliable -and no matter how much Guadagnino indicates the truth of her claim, by casting stereotypical Gen-Z positions and attitudes through this avatar as performative, he not only dismisses ideology but invites scepticism towards allegations of this kind of abuse under the guise of narrative complexity. Maybe it’s not the intent, but it is not hard to interpret Hank as the wronged one here.
And apart from that, his technical filmmaking and small choices really don’t help the film blossom out. It’s often quite abrasive, scenes of Alma and Maggie trying to have a serious discussion while Fredrick’s music occasionally blares behind them, or a pack of students suffocating Alma on campus with their protests. Guadagnino has established a great relationship with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for the music on his films, their inspired score on Challengers one of that film’s greatest qualities. Here their recurring motif is a rapidly ticking clock that intentionally drowns out everything in the scene, and regardless of its symbolic importance as perhaps representative of Alma’s mind, it is deeply distracting, irritating, and not very clever. Some of the visual notes that he brings over from previous movies, such as in a couple instances a focus on hands, don’t work as well here, their meanings more nebulous, and while single takes have their place in some instances he holds on a shot too long, as in when Hank storms off after angrily confronting Alma in her classroom and his destructive behaviour is incredibly awkward -though I’ll grant this may have been the point, it’s a touch out of line with how the script treats him otherwise.
Roberts is giving a very intense performance -were the movie itself more palatable it might be laudable. Her one scene at the end with Stuhlbarg where she comes clean with a great secret that answers a little bit for some of her behaviour is actually fairly well-structured and refreshingly sober in its subject matter. Garfield also is interesting here in playing against type very effectively -though both characters are horrid to a degree it’s hard to appreciate the good acting. Edebiri sadly feels lost. The movie ends on a point of thematic truce, which feels very problematic where sexual assault played a part, and only confirm Guadagnino’s irresponsible grasp of the material in using it as merely plot device off which to expound on frustrations of university culture, from teachers but on a more pronounced level from students. As awful as everybody clearly is meant to be, the teacher’s points about Gen-Z and sexual assault politics are given more implied salience while the student’s points are simply emotional. And bewildering in other respects, After the Hunt is a bitter movie that leaves a bitter taste.
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