After the Hunt Review: Luca Guadagnino Tackles Gen Z and #MeToo in a Provocative but Misguided Thriller
Venice Film Festival
Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, and Andrew Garfield lead the Italian director’s psychodrama
Words by Alex Secilmis 7 September 2025
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“A young black woman gets assaulted, and all these white people figure out a way to make it about themselves.” For better or worse, a memorable line delivered by Ayo Edebiri’s character, foregrounded in the trailer, perfectly sums up After the Hunt. Trading the propulsive sensuality of Challengers and the surreal heartache of Queer for a cold, kaleidoscopic investigation of a #MeToo scandal, Luca Guadagnino’s latest is a cerebral—and ultimately exploitative—exploration of power dynamics and subjective understandings of truth. Unfortunately, After the Hunt is a mess of equal opportunity social commentary. Despite its clear intentions—and blistering performances from Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield—the film is so overwhelmed by a mission of conversation-starting that it doesn’t offer much worth discussing in the first place.
Alma (Julia Roberts) is a philosophy professor on the verge of tenure at Yale University, married to a husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) more devoted to her than she is to him. She maintains close relationships with her flirtatious colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) and her loyal protégé Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), inviting them to her apartment for boozy evening discussions about how Gen Z is “scared of saying the wrong thing”. When, after one such night, Maggie accuses Hank of sexual assault, Alma isn’t sure who to support, while the incident also stirs up something from her past that she would have rather stayed buried.
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With gorgeous cinematography by Malik Hassan Sayeed and a moody score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, After the Hunt is an atmospheric, talky thriller unfolding in classrooms and apartments with large book and music libraries. This framework is the film’s best feature: as philosophy professors, students, and psychologists wrestle with their moral compasses between the walls of academia, Guadagnino builds masterful tension in the way their composed, intellectual exteriors slowly fracture after the accusation. The cast, an indisputable highlight, embodies these characters with wonderful, lived-in performances, with Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield as standouts.
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That said, After the Hunt feels like a contentious college seminar where every student, however dim-witted, gets to say their piece. We see Alma critique Gen Z’s proclivity to protest, Maggie end conversations because they make her uncomfortable, Hank bemoan the supposed discrimination of straight white men, and Chloë Sevigny’s Dr. Kim Sayers vindictively celebrate that a bar near campus is playing Morrissey despite his far-right views. The characters are nearly exclusively defined by whatever discourse and generation they represent, and through them, the film genuinely asks questions like “Is Maggie with a non-binary partner because she thinks it makes her more interesting?” There’s an almost Ricky Gervais-style straw man argument against Gen Z that undoes any of After the Hunt’s intriguing points of discussion.
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The real issue, in the end, is that After the Hunt is yet another film driven by the tension of whether a sexual assault allegation is true or not. What Guadagnino and writer Nora Garrett do with that fraught premise—leveraging sexual violence to explore how gender, age, and social standing inform characters' responses to the accusation—is too muddled and tasteless to justify this story’s existence.