After the Hunt – Film Review

By No More Workhorse on October 21, 2025 • ( Leave a comment )

Director – Luca Guadagnino
Writer – Nora Garrett
Stars – Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield

Alma (Julia Roberts) is a philosophy professor teaching the great and the good at Yale University. One of her students, Maggie (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri), is the daughter of two wealthy benefactors of Yale. She is at a sophisticated party hosted by Alma and her husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg). Maggie leaves the party with a professor called Hank (Andrew Garfield), and that’s when things start going awry. Maggie meets Alma the next day with a story of what happened to her after the night out, which will have repercussions for Hank and possibly Alma herself.

This is directed by Luca Guadagnino, who has an impressive past record with releases like Call Me By Your Name, the underrated Bones and All, and more recently Queer and Challengers. He has quickly moved to the top tier, and this time out is dealing with Hollywood royalty in the form of Julia Roberts. The part of Alma would be more normally associated with someone like Cate Blanchett, as Roberts plays an intellectual and cosmopolitan woman battling hard in the male-dominated world of academia.

This is a #MeToo story with all the trimmings of upper-class privilege. It’s an unusual time for its release, with America taking a step back from such tales, and instead classifying anything of this distinction as ‘Woke’. It’s possibly because movies take so long to get the green light, although it is not a particularly positive view of this society, so it fits the mood more than is outwardly visible. The film features trans individuals, as the older members of the faculty struggle with pronouns. One impressive scene has Chloë Sevigny as Dr Kim Sayers, delighted that the college bar continues to play Morrissey despite his political leanings!

Roberts holds her own in the tale and shows that she can play characters outside her normal ‘everywoman’ role. The rest of the actors do an admirable job, and the only real failing of this film is that it’s a little too long for its own good, with a couple of meandering subplots that could have been easily edited/ written out. Still, there are many positives in the film, with the performance of Andrew Garfield, and the ever-enjoyable Michael Stuhlbarg particularly catching the eye. If you want to feel erudite and complex, step into this world of beautiful and brilliant individuals, living in perfect homes, who, despite it all, still have real-world problems.