September 27, 2025
by Carla Hay
Amazon MGM Studios)
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
Culture Representation: Taking place in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2020 and briefly in 2025, the dramatic film “After the Hunt” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans, Latin people and Asians) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A respected philosophy professor at Yale University gets caught up in a scandal when one of her former students, who is now a Yale professor, is accused of sexual assault by one of her current students.
Culture Audience: “After the Hunt” will appeal mainly to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners, filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, and psychological dramas about sexual assault allegations and flawed people.
The uneven drama “After the Hunt” explores and sometimes abandons thought-provoking questions about secrets, lies, power and perception in a tension-filled story about sexual assault allegations. The movie has good acting but the ending plays it too safe. “After the Hunt” is the type of film that doesn’t offer easy answers and leaves a lot open to interpretation. However, this vagueness gives the unflattering impression of a movie that wants to say something important but is too afraid to say it.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Nora Garrett, “After the Hunt” had its world premiere at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival and its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival. The movie takes place in New Haven, Connecticut, the city where Yale University is located. “After the Hunt” was actually filmed in England. The story’s timeline is mostly in 2020, with an epilogue taking place in 2025.
“After the Hunt” is told mainly from the perspective of Alma Imhoff (played by Julia Roberts), a philosophy professor at Yale. Alma is well-respected at her job and is popular with many of her students. Alma seems to have a comfortable and routine upper-middle-class life with her husband Frederik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg), a psychiatrist whose job is a lot less in the public spotlight than Alma’s job. Alma and Frederik, who are both in their 50s, do not have children.
Alma is the type of professor who hosts cocktail parties in her home for a select number of Yale students and faculty. It’s at one such party where viewers see the dynamics of certain people whose relationships with each other will change forever after this party. Two of the party guests are Yale assistant professor of philosophy Hank Gibson (played by Andrew Garfield) and Yale philosophy grad student Maggie Resnick (played by Ayo Edebiri), who has nearly completed her dissertation on “performative discontent.”
Hank (who is in his late 30s) is a former student of Alma’s, while Maggie (who is in her mid-20s) is currently a student of Alma’s and Hank’s. At the party, there’s a lot of pretentious prattle and some mild debates between Maggie, Alma and Hank about Maggie’s dissertation and the merits of her thesis. Frederik occasionally participates in these conversations, but he’s mostly a slightly amused observer.
Hank is very touchy-feely with Maggie when he’s talking to her. Some viewers might think Hank’s touching is friendly, while others might think his touching is inappropriate. Maggie seems slightly uncomfortable but doesn’t say anything to Hank about his touching tendencies. Hank can be charismatic, but he has a short temper. Observant viewers will notice how quickly and easily he calls a woman a “bitch” when he gets angry.
Maggie and Hank are later revealed to be among Alma’s chosen past and present students whom she’s given preferential treatment to because she’s considered them to be among the best and brightest of her students. Maggie is openly queer and has a live-in lover named Alex (played by Lío Mehiel), a Yale law student who appears to be a transgender man or non-binary. (In real life, Mehiel identifies as a transmasculine non-binary person with “they/them” pronouns.) Hank, who is an available bachelor, has a reputation for being flirtatious with women, regardless of the women’s sexual identities.
At one point during the party, Maggie excuses herself because she says she needs to use a restroom. Alma tells Maggie to use the bathroom that’s further down the hall than the nearest bathroom because Frederik is using the nearest bathtroom for a “work project.” Inside the bathroom that Maggie is told to use, Maggie notices with some annoyance that there’s no more toilet paper on the roll that’s next to the toilet. And so, Maggie looks in the bathroom cabinet for any toilet paper.
Maggie is looking in a cabinet underneath the bathrom sink when she notices that there’s an envelope taped to the ceiling of the cabinet’s bottom shelf. Curiousity gets the best of Maggie, so she carefully removes the envelope and looks at what’s inside. The movie only shows a glimpse of what’s inside the envelope: newspaper clippings, which Maggie reads. She then puts the envelope back in its place but steals the contents of the envelope.
As the party is winding down, Maggie and Hank leave together. They’ve both been drinking enough alcohol to be tipsy and giggly but not so intoxicated that they can’t walk or speak clearly. Hank and Maggie say their goodbyes to Alma and Frederik. Everyone seems to be in good spirits.
After the party, Alma and Frederik have a private conversation in their home. It’s in this scene that cracks begin to show in their marriage. Frederik mentions, with some underlying resentment, that Alma has a pattern of giving special treatment to the students who have obvious infatuations with her and “worship” her. Alma somewhat denies it and says that the students she rewards are those who deserve special treatment based on their own intellectual merits. However, Alma doesn’t deny that she enjoys the attention from these types of students.
Another indication that Alma doesn’t have a picture-perfect life is she’s been having some type of health issue that isn’t fully revealed until the last third of the movie. Whatever is bothering Alma, it causes her to double over in pain or vomit at random times. Things have been getting so bad with this health issue, Alma illegally gets painkiller prescriptions for herself. There’s a scene showing Alma stealing sheets of paper from a prescription pad owned by her jaded friend Dr. Kim Ayers (played by Chloë Sevigny), who is a student liaison at Yale, so Alma can forge Kim’s signature to get illegal prescriptions.
On the day after the party, it’s raining, and Alma meets up with Hank at a local pub. They have a friendly conversation. And then, Hank lightly kisses Alma affectionately on the lips before he leaves. Alma seems a little taken aback but says nothing to Hank about how she feels about this kiss. Other scenes in the movie show that when it comes to Alma’s marriage to Frederik, Alma is a lot less sensitive to Frederik’s feelings than Frederik is to Alma’s feelings.
When Alma goes home, she’s surprised to see Maggie at her front door. Maggie is shivering and soaking wet from the rain. Maggie says she needs to talk to Alma about something urgent. And then, Maggie drops a bombshell: She says that Hank walked her to Maggie’s on-campus home after the party. When they got to Maggie’s place (Alex wasn’t home at the time), Maggie says Hank began kissing Maggie and ignored Maggie’s repeated requests to stop.
Maggie says Hank’s kissing escalated to sexual assault. Maggie doesn’t want to tell Alma any more details about what happened during the assault. However, Maggie insists that Maggie and Hank knew that what Hank did was non-consensual. Alma is in shock and wants to give Hank the benefit of the doubt.
Maggie looks disappointed and frustrated when she tells Alma that she thought Alma would be more supportive, “given your history.” Alma looks alarmed and defensive when she asks what Maggie meant by that comment. Maggie says, “Your history of supporting women.”
Alma privately asks Hank about Maggie’s accusation to get his side of the story. Hank says he and Maggie kissed each other consensually but he vehemently denies sexually assaulting Maggie. He adds, “This is going to sound so male: I think she came on to me.”
Hank later reveals that he thinks Maggie is lying because a few months earlier, he had discovered that she committed plagiarism for her dissertation, he confronted her, and she was under investigation for this plagiarism. Hank says he thinks Maggie accused him of sexual assault as a way to get revenge on him and to distract from the plagiarism investigation.
The rest of “After the Hunt” keeps viewers guessing about who is lying and who is telling the truth. Alma has a few big secrets that affect her perspective of this “he said/she said” sexual assault scandal. Those secrets are eventually revealed in the movie.
At first glance, “After the Hunt” seems like a “whodunit” crime drama. However, as the movie continues, it becomes apparent that “After the Hunt” is less interested in solving crimes and is more interested in showing how people’s secrets and insecurities cause them to have unconscious or conscious biases. Alma is put in a difficult position where she is pressured to “pick a side,” in terms of whom she believes and supports in this scandal.
“After the Hunt” makes attempts to depict Maggie as someone who has major disadvantages about being believed because Maggie is a black and queer woman. Her race, gender and sexual identity automatically give her “protected class” status when it comes to civil rights laws. But when it comes to how people often treat alleged sexual assault victims, Maggie doesn’t hesitate to point out that she automatically has to deal with systemic biases against her.
However true these prejudices are, “After the Hunt” makes things more complicated when it’s revealed that Maggie is an adopted child from a billionaire family that’s among the top donors to Yale. Who’s at a disadvantage now? Does that make Hank look less credible, just because his accuser comes from a rich family? Or does it make Maggie look like a rich kid who’ll use her family’s money to ruin the life of a possibly innocent man? And should the income level be important for the accuser and the accused if the investigation is supposed to be fair and impartial?
These are all questions that “After the Hunt” should have given more weight to in the story. However, the focus of the story remains on how this scandal affects Alma the most, even though Alma was not directly involved in the incident that led to this damaging sexual assault accusation. By putting too much of the focus on Alma and her secrets, “After the Hunt” loses its way.
The movie becomes a bit too much like a soap opera, where social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo are used as mere thematic props in superficial scenes. The movie seems to be saying, “What does a sexual assault of black queer female student at Yale mean to the big picture? Viewers need to worry more about how this scandal is going affect the reputation and career of a white female Yale professor who wasn’t a witness to the alleged crime.”
As serious as Maggie’s accusations are, “After the Hunt” ignores that there are things that are realistically out of Alma’s control, such as how Yale officials or any law enforcement officials would investigate this accusation. Maggie needs to be more concerned about what legal actions to take if Maggie’s allegations are true. Instead, “After the Hunt” turns much of the story into a petulant feud between Alma and Maggie.
Maggie wants to publicly shame Alma for not giving Maggie the emotional support that Maggie thinks Alma should’ve given to Maggie. Alma thinks Maggie is on a spiteful witch hunt. Meanwhile, Hank’s story arc gets sidelined for Alma’s personal drama and Alma’s secrets about certain things that happened long before Alma ever knew Maggie. Unfortunately, “After the Hunt” makes it all too obvious that Alma has something big to hide when Alma aggressively tells Maggie to stay out of Alma’s personal life.
Despite the flaws in the storytelling narrative, “After the Hunt” has some strong points, particularly the believable performances of Roberts, Edebiri and Garfield as the three people tangled up in this mess. Stuhlbarg has less screen time than Roberts, Edebiri and Garfield in “After the Hunt,” but Stuhlbarg gives a wonderfully nuanced performance as supportive husband Frederik, whose perspective isn’t shown nearly enough. Even though Alma has an image of being powerful and in control at work, it’s in contrast to when Alma is at home, where Frederik is clearly the more emotionally mature and more stable spouse.
The revelation of one of Alma’s secrets is sure to be the most divisive thing about “After the Hunt.” When this secret is revealed in a confession, it’s meant to blur the definition of what a victim really is. However, all this disclosure really accomplishes is to make Alma’s personal life overshadow the mystery of whether or not the sexual assault of Maggie really happened. (And once again, Frederik turns out to be the voice of reason when he finds out certain things.)
Even with all the scandal and moral ambiguity that “After the Hunt” wants to stir up, the movie ultimately comes across as looking too contrived. The bland “five years later” epilogue of “After the Hunt” tries to be crowd-pleasing, but it’s really a cop-out that makes what came before it in the movie look like an empty exercise in outrage. “After the Hunt” wants desperately to be a movie that feminists can admire, but the movie is a letdown to any gender. It turns a gripping story about alleged sexual assault into a basic, stereotypical and somewhat lazy cliché of women being pitted against each other, while the main man in the controversy barely gets the same type of gossip-mongering scrutiny.
“After the Hunt” does a disservice by warping the facts about who would really be held accountable in investigating rape accusations on a campus such as Yale. In real life, someone in Alma’s position would not be saddled with as much of the blame as she gets in the movie. However, Alma is the type of person who would want to make someone else’s trauma all about Alma, because Alma knows she lives in a society that places more value on a story from someone like Alma, compared to someone like Maggie. By making Alma the focus of this misguided movie, “After the Hunt” proves that point and misses an opportunity to tell a fuller and more fascinating story.
Amazon MGM Studios will release “After the Hunt” in select U.S. cinemas on October 10, 2025, with an expansion to more U.S. cinemas on October 17, 2025. Sneak previews of the movie were shown in select U.S. cinemas on Sepember 27 and October 4, 2025.
