After The Hunt – Venice Review

Luca Guadagnino’s Yale drama puts Julia Roberts at the center of a faculty storm about power, ethics, and buried secrets – with superb performances elevating a faltering script.

★★★½

“It happened at Yale” says the opening title, and one wonders what the Yale philosophy department will make of Luca Guadagnino’s sexual assault drama. Fictional philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) is faced with a dilemma when favoured student Margaret Price (Ayo Edebiri), raises accusations of assault against a fellow faculty member, Henrik Gibson (Andrew Garfield) following a party at Alma’s campus home. At the same time, a long-submerged incident from Alma’s own past threatens to come into focus.

This just might be Julia Roberts’s greatest performance, showcasing a flinty inscrutability and ambiguously cold demeanour. Garfield and Edibiri are likewise excellent – Garfield’s Hugo has a bro-ish playfully cutting personality and a kind of toxic puppy energy that does him precisely zero favours; Edebiri invests Maggie with a studied opacity, a performance that feels deliberately cloaked, leaving us unsure how much is self-presentation and how much is self. Elsewhere, Guadagnino regular Michael Stuhlbarg proves once again a reliable anchor as Alma’s psychiatrist husband, and Chloë Sevigny makes the most of her smaller turn as Dr. Kim Sayers, confidante and analyst to several players.

Sadly this exceptional cast is let down by a script that cannot sustain its early promise. Nora Garrett, making her feature debut, starts with a tight, convincing setup, only to lose grip two-thirds in. Characters begin making choices that feel forced for the sake of drama: berating, assaulting, lashing out, imploding in ways that seem more schematic than organic. The sense is less of people unraveling naturally under pressure than of a writer guiding them toward predetermined beats.

I should also mention in passing that this intelligentsia abuse-of-power sexual assault material is top-and-tailed with credits in the style and typeface of Woody Allen. Whatever statement this is meant to make is opaque at best, a distracting provocation at worst. Later, in the press conference, Guadagnino said “I felt it was also sort an interesting nod to thinking of an artist who has been, in a way, facing some sort of problems about his being, and what is our responsibility in looking at the work of an artist that we love, like Woody Allen.”

There is undeniable craft here: Malik Hassan Sayeed’s cinematography lends an academic chill to the interiors, Marco Costa’s editing sharpens the narrative’s turns, and the score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross murmurs with low-grade menace. Yet for all the artistry, this hovers just shy of triumph, elevated by its cast and crew but undermined by its text.

If you want a really great psychological thriller of sexual power dynamics centred on an accomplished female protagonist and set in an ivory tower world then Todd Field had a great one out just a couple of years ago. But as for After The Hunt, it’s a case of so near, yet so Tár.

The film premiered out of competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on August 29, 2025