Mid-way through Luca Guadagnino’s #MeToo campus drama After The Hunt, Yale University is holding a lecture — for which the theatre is packed out — titled “The Future of Jihadism is Female”.
Whether this is meant to be an earnest depiction of intersectional politics at universities or a conservative dog whistle about college becoming too woke remains unclear, making this moment a perfect microcosm of the film’s generally confused and contrived exploration of gender, race and power.
After The Hunt is a period piece set in 2019 — a time characterised by Trump’s presidency and the #MeToo movement — that follows esteemed philosophy professor and certified girlboss Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts in her best performance yet). We meet Alma at the start of the film in her natural habitat: hosting a lavish party at her absurdly nice apartment, in which her star PhD student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) and inappropriately flirtatious colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) vie for her attention so desperately they may as well be fanning her with a giant leaf while hand-feeding her grapes. All the while, her psychoanalyst husband Frederik makes snide observations about the ordeal, pointing out how much Alma enjoys bathing in their attention.
Maggie, we’re told, resorts to holier-than-thou identity politics to cover for the fact that she isn’t actually that bright or interesting. Her parents are billionaires who have made huge financial contributions to Yale, cementing her position as a wannabe-oppressed SJW. Hank is loud, touchy-feely and likes a drink. He makes a comment about young people these days being too fearful of having a bad take or being wrong.
The day after the party, Maggie doesn’t show up to class. Instead, she appears at Alma’s home in great distress and reveals that Hank sexually assaulted her the previous night after he walked her home from the party. Clearly expecting to be comforted and given advice on the basis of shared womanhood, Maggie is hurt and angered when Alma barely reacts,instead coldly demanding specific details of what happened.
Later, Alma has lunch with Hank. He tries to get ahead of the allegation by claiming Maggie made up the sexual assault allegations, knowing she, as a queer Black woman, would be believed over him, a straight white man, and this would distract from unflattering speculation around her thesis.
What ensues is a balancing act for Alma, who seems to be pissed off at everyone and everything. She’s angry at Hank, whom she must distance herself from for optics’ sake despite the fact that she still misses him. She also knows she needs to be nicer to Maggie to avoid getting cancelled, too. Amidst all this is a hidden truth so desperate to get out of Alma that she literally has fits of brutal vomiting, unable to keep her insides from leaking out.
If After The Hunt were a character study of a deeply repressed white woman confronted with the changing nature of feminism and how it complicates her own relationship with consent, I think it could have been a really interesting and insightful watch. Instead, Guadagnino decided to muddy the waters of what could have been a compelling drama with broader commentary (read: criticism) on campus culture that he doesn’t seem to understand, and the result is a film so mean-spirited and devoid of reality that one really has to wonder about his motivations.
An ongoing theme in the film is the vapid and empty nature of privileged Ivy League Gen Z students, who are apparently made impotent by sheltered identity politics and are unable to grapple with the discomfort of real life. Interestingly, the two students who we see most embody this are Maggie, the Angry Black Woman, and Katie, the quiet Asian woman (where are the liberal white students?). We do have our token persecuted white boy, but the focus of the film is clearly naive, young women of colour. Aside from the fact that this is a deeply uncharitable depiction of Gen Z that punches down more than it punches up, it’s also a conservative fantasy that simply isn’t true, if real-life events are anything to go by.
After The Hunt was filmed in July 2024, almost a year into the genocide in Gaza and three months after Columbia University students began their pro-Palestine encampments in defiance of the administration’s crackdowns on protests. These apparently deeply privileged Ivy League students were attacked by genocide supporters and raided by police who used flash bang grenades. Still, the students kept resisting and continued their demands for the university to divest from weapons manufacturing. Support for the encampments spread like wildfire, and soon other universities — including Yale — had similar movements. In May, almost 3,000 people across 61 college campuses in the US had been arrested in relation to pro-Palestine protests.
After The Hunt’s presentation of universities as performative falls flat and feels, quite frankly, petty when we’ve just seen widespread protests and even political assassinations take place in what are increasingly radicalised and repressed spaces. Even the year in which this film was set was highly politicised, characterised by roiling racial tensions that would soon result in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. While there is certainly room to criticise Gen Z — the film Eddington does so in a way that feels a little fairer than After The Hunt given that while the (notably white) teenagers in that film are impotent, they are at least earnest — this misses the mark.
Speaking of limp and lifeless: I also find it extraordinary how utterly sexless Maggie and Alma are in this film, given Guadagnino is known, prized even, for his nuanced and erotic exploration of same-sex desire. We’re told at multiple points in the movie that Maggie is attracted to Alma, and that Alma enjoys this, but it’s hard to believe.
Film scholar Genevieve Yue makes the bold suggestion in her review that, if the lead characters of this film were men, Guadagnino might have developed their sensuality more. She points to Guadagnino’s Fantastic Man interview in which he says: “One [thing I’m very knowledgeable about] is the love between men and the other is the erotic tension that’s underlying any relationship between two men, gay or straight. Given the right circumstances, any straight man can bond relentlessly with another man, and maybe even more deeply than with a woman”.
As Yue wryly points out, “Maybe the problem, for him, is imagining how women can ‘bond relentlessly’ with anyone at all”.
Let’s go back to Maggie: she’s a satire of the faux-activist Gen Z archetype, though what Gen Z has done to elicit such contempt from Guadagnino remains unclear to me (maybe it’s the age gap discourse?). The older (whiter) characters complain that Maggie uses her identity — a Black and queer woman — as a smokescreen to cover up her ordinariness. The film is vague about whether this is a racist assumption or simply true. She slums it in a tiny apartment despite her parents being billionaires because she wants to cosplay poverty, and she’s apparently only dating a non-binary person to look progressive. Maggie is framed as someone who seeks perpetual victimhood, and while there are undoubtedly young, chronically online people that do this, all I could think when watching this film was: but she is a victim?
Maggie can be patronising, pushy and entitled. What’s interesting to me is how much this movie attributes these characteristics to her race and sexuality, as well as to her billionaire upbringing. Being a member of the ruling class doesn’t seem to protect her from racism, and it certainly doesn’t prevent her from being sexually assaulted. Wealth might make it easier to react to these things — Maggie has the self-respect, entitlement and indignation to pursue justice because she’s been brought up in a world where she is taken seriously — but what role does her race play in this? Crucially, we are imbued with the idea that it’s not just Maggie’s wealth but her marginalised status that gives her power over older, more established white people. All I could think was: in what world?
Most racialised women will tell you that the colour of our skin makes it harder to be taken seriously when it comes to sensitive allegations, not easier. In reality, a woman like Maggie wouldn’t be believed so easily and completely. She wouldn’t be embraced by the press, who are ready to cancel the Evil White Man, and her perpetrator would not be immediately and swiftly dealt with to make the university safe for her.
There is one redeeming scene in this film, a hospital confession that feels like the embodiment of the movie I wish this were. It’s a poignant scene where Guadagnino’s trademark sensitivity to sex discourse shines. Still, it’s quickly undermined by a cynical epilogue where a woman mines sexual assault for content to redeem her reputation.
It’s an ending that is dismissive of the reality that women, and especially Black women, are brutalised by the public when they come forward with assault allegations. But that’s the problem with this film: it satirises a world that doesn’t exist. It’s a fantasy in every way: young Black women being empty outside of their identity, men actually being cancelled for assaulting women, even the setting of the university is a fantasy because most of the movie wasn’t filmed at Yale, but at Cambridge.
Nothing translates to real life in a way that is true, and without that nugget of truth, the satire starts to feel suspiciously like a conservative dog whistle.
Top photo – Pictured: Andrew Garfield, Julia Roberts, and Ayo Edebiri, Source: Sony Pictures International