Venice Film Festival 2025: After the Hunt
Julia Roberts gives one of her best performances in Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt, but the wordy movie around her feels more like an exhaustive debate rather than a compelling drama
It’s both a curious left turn and perhaps an inevitable evolution that Luca Guadagnino would direct After the Hunt, a film that, at first glance, would seem unfit for his intimate sensibilities. As cinema’s foremost sensualist, his movies detail the complexities of relationships fuelled by love and lust – but what happens when that line is crossed? His latest, written by Nora Garrett, broaches every thorny topic of interest in today’s climate – cancel culture, consent, institutional misogyny and racism – but in doing so, the film resembles an exhaustive debate more than a compelling story in its own right.
A debate kicks off the film, too, naturally. Philosophy professor Alma (Julia Roberts) is hosting a party with her Yale colleagues, joined by fellow lecturer Hank (Andrew Garfield) and Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a PhD student who worships her so much that she mirrors Alma’s wardrobe of sharply tailored suits. What follows next is the fallout of that gathering, as Maggie confides in Alma that Hank sexually assaulted her afterwards. He refutes that he confronted her about plagiarising her dissertation and that this accusation is retaliation. Caught between her loyalties to two close friends, Alma resists choosing either of them.
Guadagnino’s movies thrive on the intensity of their feeling, where intimacy and desire spill through the screen. After the Hunt is decidedly more austere, but even with its intense subject matter, the film is lacking in tension or emotional weight. Garrett’s wordy screenplay is the clear crux: characters don’t just address cancel culture, they belabour through every talking point – and by voicing everything, the film ultimately says nothing. For a movie that attempts to poke the hornet’s nest of politics, the most provocative element is the use of Woody Allen’s go-to typeface in the opening credits.
Still, Guadagnino remains an excellent filmmaker, making the most of what’s there. Working with DP Malik Hassan Sayeed (his first feature since 1998’s Belly), he constructs a striking visual language of close-ups focusing on bodies. Nervous hands gesture and fidget, suggesting a hidden truth between the lines uttered by these verbose academics. Guadagnino uses his favoured canvas to illustrate power: Alma and Hank lounge with their legs stretched out, taking up as much space as possible. Along with other stylistic flourishes like unexpected framing and rapid zooms, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ unnerving score of dissonant pianos and unstructured melodies also throws characters off balance.
As the frosty Alma, Roberts is superb in one of her best roles in years, masking vulnerability behind an intimidating wall that renders her unreadable. It’s apt for a film concerned with the corrosive power of secrets and the stories we tell about ourselves. If After the Hunt gets lost in its discourse, it also finds that empathy is abandoned for the sake of self-preservation. The “business of optics”, as they say in one of many heated discussions, takes precedence over people.
After the Hunt had its world premiere at Venice Film Festival
Released 20 Oct by Sony; certificate TBC