After the Hunt

 

To my mind and eye, director Luca Guadagnino's films are beautifully crafted and edgy (A Bigger Splash, Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All, Challengers, Queer) but are frequently undercut by facile treatment of material he wants audiences to seriously engage. His latest picture, After the Hunt, is representative of the celebrated filmmaker's habit of not fully pulling off an ambitious (and worthy) experiment.

Set in the halls and environs of Yale University -- which, interestingly, is most commonly referred to only as "Yale" -- After the Hunt (which might be referring to the baying of wolves in the wake of a successful kill) concerns a group of self-involved academics who revolve around star philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts). Her nearest satellites are verbose colleague and frenemy Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) and her comparatively taciturn acolyte, Ph.D. student Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri).

Alma is plagued by some mysterious illness, but practically glows with entitlement as she is casually intimidating in the classroom and shimmeringly flirtatious at parties she throws with her doting psychoanalyst / gourmet / provocateur husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), whom she treats with something marginally better than contempt.

Alma is writer Nora Garrett's wonderful portrait of a detached, over-compensated and entitled intellectual, but Garrett and Guadagnino are not as successful with the rest of the complex cast of characters. Hank is both attractive and repugnant, and Maggie, admirable and pathetic. These contradictions add interesting layers to the story, but the jagged pieces of their personalities don't fit together to provide a full picture.

The intrigue at the center of the film is an accusation of sexual assault raised by Maggie against Hank. The student takes the charge to Alma, who resents being drawn into the mess and wonders, despite her ardent public feminism, if the claims are even true. Audiences have seen Maggie's stalkerish behavior and Hank's rakish tendencies, so anything could be true, and watching these truly unlikable people twist in the wind is interesting for a while, but ultimately it's just depressing.