(IMAGE: Amazon MGM Studios.)
Amazon MGM Studios. 2025. Drama/Mystery & Thriller/ Crime. 138 minutes.
RATING: 2 out of 4
Did we ever get our definitive “MeToo” movie? Some would say Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman” (2020) hit that mark — a twisty, deservedly praised film, but one whose point was diluted by the backloaded structure and emotional mechanics of a revenge thriller. Others might cite Kitty Green’s “The Assistant” (2019), a brilliant treatise on the collaterally damaged — the witnesses in spaces where workplace assault occurs, who kill off their consciences and then look away. And of course there’s Asia Argento’s “Scarlet Diva” (2000), in which the actress and filmmaker recreated her alleged victimization at the hands of Harvey Weinstein, so that when justice came for Weinstein seventeen years later, a damning piece of primary evidence was hiding in plain sight.
The “MeToo” film I’m personally haunted by preceded the MeToo Era by more than a decade: Deborah Eisenstadt’s unjustly forgotten 2006 drama of the theatre “The Limbo Room,” about an understudy in a play like “A Streetcar Named Desire” which culminates in onstage sexual assault. “The Limbo Room” was based in part on Eisenstadt’s time understudying David Mamet’s disgracefully phallocentric sexual harassment two-hander “Oleanna,” and as a drama of the theatre, it draws a bleared and ambiguous line between sexual assault as entertainment and workplace violence.
Eisenstadt placed the viewer in the confused space of adjudicator, asking us to grope our way toward a truth the central characters run from. Something similar is attempted by director Luca Guadagino and screenwriter Nora Garrett in “After the Hunt,” a movie resembling “Oleanna” not only in its college milieu but also its skepticism about the politics of accusation surrounding assault claims. Guadagino isn’t trying to make a MeToo movie exactly, but rather a post-MeToo one, designed to measure the potential flaws in the conventional wisdoms and supposed groupthink of the MeToo moment. Though the result is a sinuous arthouse thriller, often brilliantly acted, and framed by Malik Hassan Sayeed’s supple cinematography and a stunning new score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to seem pregnant with meaning, what emerges is a film with the basic structure and essential weightlessness of a “duel of wits” soufflé like “Sleuth.”
The questionable choices start early, when Guadagino leads with opening credits perfectly mimicking the white on black, Windsor font title cards from every Woody Allen movie made after 1975, including 1996’s “Everyone Say I Love You,” the Allen movie that shares a lead in “After the Hunt’s” Julia Roberts. Accompanied a la Woody by an old jazz standard in a movie that doesn’t contain many, the titles play as both homage and a tipped hand — a truly bizarre launchpoint for an alleged inquiry into the politics and power dynamics of sexual assault and harassment.
Julia Roberts is Alma, a Yale philosophy professor up for tenure, just like the William H. Macy character in “Oleanna.” Her young protege Maggie (Ayo Ideberri) attends a party at the house of Alma and husband Frederick (waspishly overperformed by Guadagino regular Michael Stuhlbarg). Also present is Alma’s bestie Hank (Andrew Garfield), a theatrical and broad-minded departmental colleague and fellow tenure seeker, who indiscreetly challenges every student within his vocal range to stop being so timid about causing offense, all the while flirting in a comradely way with Maggie, whom Hank leaves with at the end of the night.
The next day Maggie misses Alma’s class. When Alma returns home, Maggie is waiting on the stairs, soaking wet, and trembling with trauma. And the kind of accusations that could ruin Hank’s career….
As the woman in the middle, Roberts gives one of her most nuanced performances. Alma is a sleepwalker, going through life frozen in just the way an iceberg is: through an accumulation, built around something immovable in her past. Her reactions are careful, her responses impersonal. On paper, Alma is not a strong candidate for a role that could nab someone an Oscar.
But something in this repressed intellectual in crisis really spoke to Roberts, who makes Alma fascinating to watch though she’s working hard to be inscrutable. The pain below the surface is so acute it becomes visible even when Alma’s face goes blank, and though we frequently don’t know what Alma is thinking, we have no doubt she feels it intensely.
In the decidedly secondary role of Hank, Andrew Garfield remains an actor who can do anything, from menace to charm, and one hopes this includes the ability to return to Britain and follow up on the 2005 Romeo that established him with a Coriolanus or a Hamlet or some other great Shakespearean creation. He’s clearly capable of it, and the movie thing is starting to give off vibes of not entirely working out.
Ideberri’s Maggie, like pretty much any other character from her generation, is too busy being a righteous cartoon to register much as a human. Though Guadagino struggles for the first hour or so to give Maggie a hearing, you can tell he loathes the character, not least because she spouts ideological catchphrases even when she’s reporting her own sexual violation. Maggie is a woman of color and a lesbian, ticking off what are expressly stated to be DEI boxes, and Guadagino and Garrett’s position seems to be “so what kind of a chance does a man accused by such a DEI darling have?”
When Alma finally tells Maggie off, primarily over her generational entitlement, there’s little doubt it’s Guadagino hollering, “Hey kid, get off my lawn.” In an exceptionally implausible coda, and though besmirched to the point of breakdown by Maggie’s charges against Hank, Alma is revealed at the denouement to be the dean of Yale just five years on, a twist intended to indicate through irony how the MeToo movement essentially changed not a thing, but only stickummed adolescent righteousness onto the grown-up world for awhile.
All of this weights the argument toward the man in the scenario, just as it was in two notable precursor movies also directed by men: “Oleanna” (adapted for the screen by Mamet himself in 1994) and Barry Levinson’s “Disclosure” (also 1994), where Michael Douglas was sexually assaulted and harassed by his younger, sexier female boss.
It’s beyond disappointing to see another bigtime male director default to the position that in controversies of sex, where it’s often men who lose their careers or go to jail, it’s men who are therefore the victims. That counterintuity might play for the gullible in a highly constructed fiction like “After the Hunt,” but out here on Earth it’s all a whole lot more complicated. Guadagino knows this intellectually if not emotionally, and he’s enough of an arthouse mannerist to leave room for some if not much ambiguity about where he stands. But “After the Hunt’s” token bothsidesism is ultimately a self-protective muddle. Despite Roberts’ intricate performance, Guadagino’s studied inflections of ambivalence feel performative and forced. Like Alma, by the end of “After the Hunt,” we’re left at a loss.
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