REVIEW. AFTER THE HUNT: An Unsmiling Julia Roberts Gives a Great Performance in an Otherwise Awful Movie.

NOTE: This review may contain spoilers and profanity.

I once had a friend (notice the verb tense) who asked me if I knew what I was going to see when I went to a movie. When I replied that I actually read preview notices and reviews, he just shrugged and said that, whenever the spirit moved him to go to the theater, he just showed up and bought a ticket for whatever feature was playing next. I can only imagine his face if I told him I went knowingly and willingly to see a Julia Roberts movie that didn't contain her mega-watt smile.

The smile that launched a thousand (I may be exaggering slightly) successful rom-coms, that ear-to-ear grin that lit up movie screens worldwide. At one time, Julia Roberts was the only actress among a small group of artists (including Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis), who could actual "open" a movie. Even so, as a female, her salary was a bit lower than the then all-male $20 million/movie club.

But I digress. Julia Roberts is an artist I've always respected, in spite of the sometimes snide comments made about her rom-com history. If you asked my husband, he'd cringe at how many times I've watched all - or parts of - Pretty Woman and Notting Hill. Over the years, though, Roberts has diversified her acting portfolio to include more serious fare in films like Erin Brockovich (for which she won the Best Actress Oscar), Charlie Wilson's War and last year's Leave the World Behind. Nontheless, she's never taken a role so thoroughly unlikeable as Alma Imhoff, a respected philosophy professor on tenure-track at Yale University.

I'm not surprised that the opportunity to play a serious academic in a politically charged, socially relevant film about sexual abuse in higher education held some appeal, especially in light of the recent MeToo movement. In recent interviews promoting After the Hunt, Roberts said she has been "fortunate" avoiding sexual harrassment or abuse in the film industry and she hopes the movie will continue to spark debate and challenge perceptions about this issue. Activism and timeliness all wrapped up into one. Sounds like an appriopriately relevant topic.

But here's my question:

When the fuck will Hollywood get a clue about academia? After decades of opportunities to show higher education in a reasonably accurate/realistic way, Hollywood, I'm sorry to say, has come up short. We've had beloved teachers (Goodbye, Mr. Chips, To Sir, With Love, and Dead Poets Society), and curmudgionly ones (The Holdovers) who inspire, but those examples are typically about select educators at niche private high schools.

At University, the stories are fewer and the pickings slim: Inept administrators abound to great comic relief in Animal House. Charming, if emotionally screwed up professors, dominate The Wonder Boys, and a sexually ambiguous faculty-student relationship is the focus of David Mamet's controversial Oleanna, a movie whose topic preceded the MeToo movement by two decades. There are other examples, for sure, but none that expresses the complex environments found on college campuses, or the even more delicate inter-personal connections that are often made among students, faculty and staff.

After the Hunt, opening nationwide this weekend, was initially labeled an Oscar frontrunner before its Venice Film Festival premiere in August, but has since become an afterthought among contenders as awards season cranks up. What a difference a few weeks makes. Even though a barely smiling Julia Roberts has maintained mostly rave reviews for her performance, NYTimes film critic Alissa Wilkinson claimed the movie itself seems "bent on driving any academics watching it straight to the local dive bar afterward." As a conflicted Yale philosophy navigating the waters of sexual allegations made by her best PhD student Maggie (The Bear's Ayo Edebiri) against faculty colleague/friend Hank (Andrew Garfield), Roberts is caught in the middle of numerous philosophical and ethical conundrums, none of which seem to add up, and most of which seem self-consciously intent on proving the movie's relevance.

Still, it's hard to win an Oscar for a great performance in a mediocre film, and that's what we have in After the Hunt, a carefully crafted higher ed "thriller" that trots in ripe with platitudes and clichés. Director Luca Guadagnino has made sure the audience doesn't miss any of the heavy-handed symbolism: Alma typically always dresses in white with a black blazer and loafers. Maggie follows suit. Both Alma and Maggie favor short, darkly polished nails, and the camera lingers repeatedly, alternately, on their hands as they speak. Every morning, Alma's psychotherapist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) leaves two vitamin B supplements on her nightstand, then kisses her and slinks away without ever uttering a word. We see the book on her nightstand is Thomas Mann's 1901 novel, Buddenbrooks.

Got it? A little light reading about the life and mores of the Baltic bourgeoisie.

It gets worse, but I'll spare the ham-fisted details. Suffice to say every shot, every frame, from the large, metriculously decorated, dimly lit apartment in which Alma and Frederik to live (Really? How can they afford this huge place - and help for the party?), to the stark white light that permeates Alma's personal writing getaway apartment, to the sepia-infused offices and classrooms at Yale, Guadagnino makes sure you don't miss a gesture, a glance, or a symbol. He piles ethical dilemma upon moral ambiguity, feeding the movie's central conceit with more useless information, data and images that ultimately detract from the controversy the movie aspires to ignite.

In short, Alma and Hank are both up for tenure, which seems a bit far-fetched, given that Roberts is nearly sixty and Garfield is in his early forties. Even if we're to believe that Alma entered academia later than most, it doesn't quite add up that these two are not only colleagues but longtime friends (with benefits?). Anyway, at a boozy party Alma and Frederik host at their apartment where everyone speaks in long, rambling, often contradictory sentences (I've heard few academics talk this way), Maggie leaves with Hank, who offers to give her a ride home. The next day, Maggie tells Alma that, after inviting Hank to her apartment for a nightcap, a drunken Hank "didn't stop when she said no."

When Alma confronts Hank about Maggie's accusations, he tells her that he intentionally offered Maggie a ride in order to address a different issue: he discovered she'd plagiarized her doctoral dissertation. Maggie is a young gay black woman whose wealthy parents are major donors to the University. Do we see Hank and Alma's predicament getting more challenging? Alma is reluctant to support Maggie, who offers no evidence of the assault other than her claims that Hank went too far. So Alma takes a neutral position, and then (of course), everything unravels from there.

Hank is fired almost immediately without so much as an investigation, a suspension, or an HR intervention. What happened to PIP's (Performance Improvement Plan)? Where is Hank's tenure review committe in all this? The department chair? Maggie then goes public about Hank in the Yale newspaper, and Alma is dragged through the muck with both of them. This in itself may still seem like a resolvable situation, but there's more. Turns out Alma has a secret of her own related to a sexual abuse situation that she's been hiding for years. Let's add that to an already convoluted mix, cross our fingers, and hope for the best.

Truth is, Roberts isn't the only unlikeable character in this movie. All the players are thoroughly pretentious, self-centered assholes (Frederik may be the exception, but only because he makes a mean cassoulet), that create the illusion that University faculty and staff are all petty, lying, unethical jerks who drink too much and screw everything that moves.

In a NYTimes OpEd last week, columnist Michelle Goldberg described the movie as a dated fallout from the MeToo movement, "a memento of the micro-era, toward the exhausted end of Joe Biden’s presidency, when the backlash against self-righteous progressivism was cresting, and taking on sanctimonious college students seemed, at least in some circles, like a brave provocation." Goldberg goes on to assert that After the Hunt brings "reactionary centrism," a term coined in 2018 by Democratic strategist Aaron Huertas to describe "a style of politics that prides itself on even-handedness while being disproportionately obsessed with left-wing overreach," to prestige cinema, but that assumption is itself an overreach and gives the movie far more credit than it deserves.

Nora Garrett's original screenplay is filled with stereotypes, prototypes, archetypes. You name it, they're here: Hank the arrogant and leacherous young faculty member, Alma the serious philosopher successful and calculating in how she cultivates adoration from student disciples, Frederik the smug psychoanalyist, and Maggie the lazy and entitled, conniving doctoral student. Garrett has been touted as a cum laude graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, as it this accomplishment gives her some insight into higher education. Obviously, she wasn't paying attention to her environment, as she is completely clueless about University practices, the tenure process, or academics. She might have taken a look at Netflix's 2021 limited series, The Chair, co-created by the actress Amanda Peet and screenwriter Annie Julia Wyman. It is, by far, the closest any series or film has come to capturing life in academia.

In one scene, a distraught Alma goes off on her graduate students during a seminar in a scene so unbelievable it's almost funny. If anything even close to that exchange ever happened in a college classroom, the professor would not walk away unscathed. At this point, I wasn't sure who Guadagnino & Co. wanted to skewer: Yale, the MeToo movement, "woke" culture, the white male cisgender power structure, something else? Even odder additions to the movie are the title and end credits, presented in exactly the same way every Woody Allen begins all his movies, with Windsor Light Condensed font, specifically, white font against a black background, actors listed alphabetically in order of appearance. Was Guadagnino paying tribute to Allen, or referencing Allen's own controversy with adopted daughter Dylan Farrow during the MeToo movement? Just what, if anything this film purports to say about MeToo, liberalism, today's university environment, or generational feminism is left unclear and muddled.

The movie's original ending showed Alma leaving academia after her tenure denial and returning home to Sweden to confront her past. Director Guadagnino didn't think that resolution was consistent with contemporary practices on university campuses. He reportedly asked Garrett to rewrite the ending/epilogue to show Roberts five years later, a tenured faculty member and dean, having published an article about her past transgressions as a way of redemption.

She meets Maggie for drinks, and the two have a brief, awkward, and tense conversation about the past and their present situations before a coldly terse embrace and good-bye. It is an altogether bland, totally fitting end to a thoroughly annoying, inauthentic movie, one that tries so hard to be important, it loses its point and ignores some fine performances, notably from Roberts and Garfield.

The movie got me thinking, though, mostly about its depiction of life on college/university campus. Are we expected to accept that After the Hunt presents an accurate, believeable perspective about how delicate situations are handled at Universities today? As someone who has spent the past three-plus decades in higher education, first as a faculty member (I did receive tenure) and later, as an administrator, I can attest to having managed many, sometimes complicated, situations, including some similar to the one in the movie.

I've dealt with student accusations against faculty members, internal faculty conflicts, and administrators looking for handbook loopholes so they can make decisions that have threatened to compromise shared governance, arguably the gold standard for how universities functions. I've tried to steer emotionally dysfunctional faculty to a healthier place, and I've watched administrators try to spin, distort, and reinvent issues in order to avoid conflict.

It's a professional journey that has, at times, been disheartening, and the current political climate doesn't make the future of higher education seem much brighter. But, in all this time, I have never witnessed the kind of blatant disregard for process and academic integrity depicted in After the Hunt. Guadagnino's interpretation of 21st century universities is highly inaccurate and, more importantly, irresponsible. And all this at Yale University, no less.

Maybe that was the point and the joke's on me, but a movie whose tagline reads, "Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable" is a trite excuse for a film that aspires to much loftier goals. After Guadagnino's successes in high-powered films like last year's Challengers and the achingly poignant exploration of first love in 2017's Call Me By Your Name, I was expecting much more subtlty, complexity and authenticity from After the Hunt.

Perhaps, the line Hank uses to summarize Maggie's accusations when Alma probes him for information is the best description of this movie: "There's fucking clichés everywhere. It's all bullshit."

Now that's a bingo. Give Hank an "A+" and the movie a "C." Come to think of it, a "C" in graduate school is a failing grade.

*******

After the Hunt is rated R for adult subject matter, language and brief nudity. It is scheduled to stream on Prime Video in the future.

References

Michelle Goldberg's OpEd, "The New Julia Roberts Movie Seethes With Anti-Woke Resentment," appeared in the October 13, 2025 edition of the NYTImes.

Alissa Wilkinson's After the Hunt Review, "Uncomfortable, for the Wrong Reasons," appeared in the October 9, 2025 edition of the NYTimes.