Julia Roberts delivers one of her finest performances in this razor-sharp academic thriller
Cinema has been wrestling with conversations around truth, consequences, and accountability ever since the rise of the #MeToo movement, and not always gracefully. Plenty of filmmakers have attempted to dissect the cultural shift. Still, few have approached it with the level of nuance, restraint, and intellectual finesse that After the Hunt wields so deftly. Rather than choosing sides or simplifying the discourse into heroes and villains, director Luca Guadagnino and first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett deliver something far more provocative: a film that observes the battlefield of modern ethics without ever pretending that morality is binary.
At its core, After the Hunt is a character study dressed in the clothing of a psychological thriller. It explores the battleground not of social media or tabloids, but of academia — a place where logic and reason are supposed to reign, yet ego and desire quietly call the shots. Every heated debate and polite wine-fuelled dinner in this world carries the weight of unspoken hierarchies. Beneath the soft lighting and well-stocked bookshelves lies rivalry, resentment, and repressed history.
And at the centre of it all? Julia Roberts commands the screen with the kind of poised intensity that reminds you exactly why she’s a Hollywood icon. As Alma Imhoff, a seasoned Yale philosophy professor on the cusp of securing tenure, Roberts is absolutely magnetic, clearly sinking her teeth into a role that is calculating, elegant, and simmering with internal conflict. She is both mentor and manipulator, idealist and opportunist. Every smile feels measured. Every silence feels weaponised. There is a similarity here between Roberts’ performance and Cate Blanchett’s Kathryn St. Jean in Black Bag, released in early 2025. (Both also have fabulous apartments that I only dream I could afford!)
The film opens on her morning routine, shot with surgical precision and scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross a heartbeat-like ticking beneath Alma’s carefully choreographed steps. It evokes the sensation of watching a bomb being assembled. We intuitively know: This is a woman in control. And we also know that the control will be tested.
Soon enough, the supporting figures enter the chessboard. Ayo Edebiri impresses as Maggie, Alma’s ambitious PhD student who is sharp, observant, and perhaps overly obsessed with her mentor. Andrew Garfield is equally compelling as Hank Gibson, Alma’s close colleague and occasional flirtation partner, balancing charm with just enough emotional instability to be unsettling. Their chemistry with Alma forms a triangle built not on romance but on power, and power, as always, is extremely fragile.
The rupture comes after an academic dinner party that Guadagnino crafts as a suspenseful set piece. The wine flows, the laughter crackles, the flattery and philosophical posturing escalate — and then the camera lingers just a little too long on lingering glances, on hands brushing fabric, on someone looking where they shouldn’t. It’s sensual, not in a romantic sense, but in an almost predatory, logical one. People who believe themselves to be the smartest in the room are often the worst at seeing danger when it’s staring them in the face.
The next evening, Maggie arrives at Alma’s door in tears. She claims Hank assaulted her.
From here, After the Hunt could have easily devolved into a courtroom drama, but instead, Garrett’s script refuses to follow a linear path. The question of whether Hank is guilty quickly becomes secondary to the question of how belief fractures relationships. Alma reports the accusation to the Dean. Hank loses his job. The institution moves swiftly, perhaps too swiftly. Hank swears innocence. Maggie stands firm. And Alma clearly wrestles between the loyalty to Hank, who she knows could be capable of this, and Maggie, her student, whom she has dedicated so much time and energy to. The film refuses to answer outright, and that’s exactly what makes it so interesting to watch as the events unravel.
After the Hunt builds tension not by revealing the truth, but by denying it. Flashbacks are sparing. Testimonies are incomplete. Every character carries a contradiction that complicates our trust in them. Maggie, for all her brilliance, may not be the stable academic prodigy she appears to be. Hank, for all his desperation, carries entitlement like a second skin. Alma, for all her poise, harbours past wounds that might be informing her judgement in ways she herself doesn’t fully grasp.
Guadagnino leans heavily on atmosphere to heighten the psychological warfare. The framing of book-filled halls and mahogany offices evokes prestige, but the lighting always leans toward gold fading into shadow, as though the past is slowly eclipsing the present. There are shots here that keep you guessing at character motivations, in an Indian restaurant, Garfield and Roberts are sitting opposite each other with mirrors on the wall and the camera allows us to see all angles of their faces. There are many more scenes like this that allow for Guadagnino to showcase his brilliance. The score pulses like a warning. Every conversation becomes a duel.
If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that Maggie, who is a queer, wealthy, Black academic, is such a culturally complex character that the film occasionally lightly dances around just how much weight that identity holds in such a narrative. There’s a version of this film that digs deeper into the intersections of race, class, and victimhood within elite institutions; After the Hunt gestures toward it more often than it commits to it. It does clock in at 2 hours and 19 minutes; it could have done with an extra 15 or 20 minutes to explore this a bit further.
Still, what the film does dare to explore, it does so with razor-sharp clarity. It is not a commentary against #MeToo nor one in defence of so-called cancel culture. Instead, it invites something far more demanding: intellectual honesty—the ability to interrogate not just the actions of others, but our motivations when we judge them.
And it is Julia Roberts who anchors that interrogation. Her performance is scalpel-sharp. The quiet devastation in her posture as consequences ripple outward, how she shifts from professor to participant in a game she doesn’t have any control over. It is far from the 90’s rom-com Roberts of Notting Hill, or even Erin Brockovich.
Gripping, morally complex, and anchored by a phenomenal Julia Roberts performance, After the Hunt is a film that doesn’t seek to answer the cultural debates of our time — it forces us to confront how we participate in them. Like most Guadagnino films, it is most definitely a slow burn, but a richly rewarding one.
After the Hunt is in cinemas October 16.
