Luca Guadagnino has established a reputation as a filmmaker unwilling to be confined to a single genre. His desire to explore a wide variety of stories has remained admirable in the last few years, even to fans who haven’t gelled with all of his works. From a hushed, yearning romance in Queer (2024) to a sports melodrama in Challengers (2024) to a grotesquely intimate, cannibal road trip movie in Bones and All (2022), the leaps in subject and tone underscore a restless imagination. Guadagnino’s latest film, After the Hunt (2025), continues this pattern of reinvention, diving into the sheltered halls of academia. Here, Guadagnino attempts to stage a moral inquiry into questions of power, institutional structures, and ethical compromise.
Caught Between Professional Crossroads
College professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) drifts through the routines of academic life as the relentless tick of a clock intrudes, a metronome counting down to the unspooling of her world and those in her direct orbit. The Yale University setting acts as a pressure cooker where boundaries between students and faculty collapse under the weight of desire, ego, and complicity. Gathered in Alma’s extravagant apartment for a dinner party, it becomes clear that the dynamic between these students and their Yale professors is unconventional, as alcohol and verbal sparring flow freely.
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Alma’s favoritism toward Margaret Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), a gifted philosophy PhD student, is barely disguised. However, she notices that something is off when her colleague, Professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), walks Maggie home that evening. After vanishing from class for a few days, the star student reappears, soaked and shivering, in the same hallway where Alma last saw her. While initially hesitant to explain herself, Maggie soon confesses to Alma that Hank has violated her trust and boundaries.
A Bitter Contest of Narratives
A “he said, she said” dilemma then unfolds across the Yale campus with deliberate ambiguity, urging Alma to pick a side in the accusation. As allegiances shift, each character peels the layers of their inner psyche, revealing their truths and deceptions. None shows their true self quicker than Hank, who has a self-proclaimed “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t” victim mentality as he is up for tenure at Yale alongside Alma. He’s the kind of man who believes everything that comes out of his mouth to be gospel, despite existing within a spiral of his own lies and delusions.
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Alma, by contrast, is more elusive. Her position bends and wavers with every revelation. What begins as a defense of her young protégée morphs into hesitation, self-doubt, and, finally, the resurfacing of a dark secret from her own past. In her debut feature screenplay, writer Nora Garrett crafts a timely parable with strengths that are not easily accessible to most moviegoers. The dialogue, steeped in the vernacular of academia, remains stubbornly hyper-specific, even outside of the college campus setting. This relentlessly verbose nature of the script denies After the Hunt the quiet, reflective space synonymous with Luca Guadagnino’s work.
Instead, After the Hunt occasionally veers into excessive territory, as if straining to assert its own importance in a post- #MeToo era. It’s a tendency that, in turn, alienates the viewer rather than drawing them in.
Julia Roberts Elevates Heavy-handed Storytelling
Beneath the density of words in Nora Garrett’s script lies material of substantial weight. Garrett’s writing wrestles with generational conflict, interrogating the way age groups turn on one another as though that antagonism were the root of deeper societal fractures. Also, After the Hunt examines the compromises demanded of women, such as the extreme pressure to conceal or renounce truth in order to preserve reputation and status. These are all potent themes and ideas. Yet, the way the script spells them out to the audience makes the impact feel more blunt than genuinely earned.
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A fair portion of the first act plays out exclusively in a series of unadorned two-shots. The camerawork becomes more varied and dynamic as the plot progresses, but is still often frustratingly plain and frankly dim, requiring the performances to compel the viewer primarily. Fortunately, the cast rises to the challenge. The great Julia Roberts (Leave the World Behind) personifies Alma, a woman pushed to her finest limits, by balancing control with fragility. She allows glimpses at the strain caused by the blurring of her professional and personal life, creating a strong empathy for someone put in her precarious situation.
A Notable Cast Can Only Do So Much
Equally, Andrew Garfield (We Live in Time) seems to find it easy to portray a man who is, to put it plainly, a woman’s worst nightmare. He is eerily convincing, despite being accused of assault, and at times conjures a performance that can make your skin crawl. The Bear and Opus star Ayo Edebri is the hardest to read out of the trio, perhaps intentionally to sow the seeds of ambiguity. Even when keeping that in mind, though, her portrayal of a woman fighting to prove allegations of assault doesn’t always reach the required emotional heights.
As it reaches its conclusion, After the Hunt gestures at the notion that life has a way of unmasking wrongdoing and rewarding bravery, especially when that process feels catastrophic in the moment. When the movie finally sharpens to its point, it lands with force. However, the journey to get there is weighed down by a clumsy narrative and a lack of faith in its audience. Director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Nora Garrett evidently have a lot to say about this story’s delicate subject matter, but the film ultimately circles its themes without fully delving into any of them. What remains is a work that intrigues and occasionally unsettles, yet never quite delivers anything profoundly insightful to reflect on.
After the Hunt premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival! The movie will be released in limited theaters on October 10 and then expand nationwide on October 17.
Release Date: October 10, 2025.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino.
Written by Nora Garrett.
Produced by Luca Guadagnino, Brian Grazer, Jeb Brody, & Allan Mandelbaum.
Executive Producers: Alice Dawson, Nora Garrett, Karen Lunder, & Justin Wilkes.
Main Cast: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny, Lío Mehiel, Ariyan Kassam, Will Price, Thaddea Graham, Christine Dye, & Burgess Byrd.
Cinematographer: Malik Hassan Sayeed.
Composers: Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross.
Production Companies: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Imagine Entertainment, Frenesy Film Company, & Big Indie Pictures.
Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios (North America) & Sony Pictures Releasing International.
Runtime: 139 minutes.
Rated R.
