After the Hunt is uncomfortable, divisive, and necessary. It provokes, not by offering answers, but by forcing audiences to confront the ways we judge, doubt, and sometimes fail each other.

“If it was real to you, it’s real.”

“Not everything is supposed to make you feel comfortable,” and Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt is certainly no exception. Following Bones and All (2022) and Queer (2024), Guadagnino returned to the Venice Film Festival with a film that continues his exploration of desire, moral ambiguity, and the fragility of human relationships. As in his previous work, After the Hunt reflects on mentorship and intimacy, trauma within institutional structures, and the tension between attraction and destruction. In After the Hunt, the boundary under scrutiny is truth itself: messy, unstable, and never fully grasped. It’s a gripping psychological drama that refuses easy answers; a film about power, memory, and the ambiguity of truth. 

At the center of After the Hunt is Alma (Julia Roberts), a respected college philosophy professor whose professional and personal life begins to unravel when Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), one of her most promising students, accuses her colleague (and close friend) Hank (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault.

From the very first minute, Guadagnino establishes a pervasive sense of unease, with the sound of a ticking clock echoing over the production title cards — a subtle, ominous countdown marking the passage of time and hinting that something might be running out of time, though what exactly isn’t revealed (yet). The opening credits, a nod to Woody Allen’s cinema, are just as provocative. Given Allen’s history, Guadagnino confronts the audience with the uneasy intersections of art, abuse, and complicity. And from the very first frame, a sense of tension is established, lingering, unresolved, throughout the film’s 139-minute runtime.

The story quickly becomes a labyrinth of suspicion, moral compromise, and emotional tension. It’s as much about what is unsaid as what is revealed, placing the audience in the uncomfortable position of questioning motives, memory, and ethics alongside its characters — even in places where certainty should exist.

The world of academia is rendered with careful precision, highlighting blurred boundaries and the subtle intimacies that make power structures so insidious. Early on, Alma and her husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) are hosting a small gathering of faculty members and students — a seemingly innocent event that, in reality, teeters on the edge of inappropriateness. Even though it seems normal for university professors to host gatherings at their homes with faculty and students — to build relationships, discuss projects, offer mentorship, and celebrate — it can quickly blur the line between what’s considered appropriate and what’s not. Conversations winding into intimate territory, touches lingering, and glances carrying an unsettling weight;  topics they’re discussing, the way they’re speaking to one another, and their physical closeness; everything blurs boundaries, quietly reminding us that institutions often operate in these liminal spaces, where admiration, desire, and transgression coexist uneasily.

Amid the gathering, Maggie slips away to the bathroom, and as she closes the door, the camera lingers on it, signaling that something significant is about to occur. While searching for toilet paper, she discovers a hidden envelope tucked into one of the cabinets. Its content feels immediately mysterious. Why would someone hide this in a bathroom cabinet? In a small but telling gesture, Maggie takes something hidden in the envelope — a seemingly minor act that will later add another layer of ambiguity. Is it evidence, provocation, or a trick of memory? The film refuses to answer these questions right away, and the uncertainty begins to infect everything that follows, setting the stage for the moral and emotional tension to come.

These narrative seeds are complemented by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s sparse piano score, which resonates like a heartbeat of doubt, intensifying the tension without ever guiding the audience toward resolution. Guadagnino’s slow zooms, close-ups on hands and eyes, and meticulous framing manipulate what we see, forcing us to interpret gestures and expressions as though they were clues. The audience then becomes complicit in the doubt and suspicion (and remains complicit until the very last minute of the film), mirroring societal tendencies to question survivors when belief is precisely what is needed.

It’s revealed by Maggie that Hank went to her apartment for a “night cap,” after the gathering (pretending he just wanted to spend time with her in a situation where she might let her guard down — and perhaps eventually confess what she did wrong). Maggie never explicitly says what happened, only that he assaulted her. When Alma asks for details, she grows nervous, questioning whether they truly matter — because in the end, what truly matters is that he assaulted her. This is one of the first moments the audience might question her sincerity, as she withholds the details, and that very hesitation plants a seed of doubt that lingers throughout the scene.

And then the tension only deepens when Maggie explains why she came to Alma specifically. Given Alma’s history, Maggie says, she was the best person to confide in. Alma, however, is left surprised, even concerned, wondering what Maggie means. As she tries to rationalize her choice, invoking Alma’s position at the university and her support for women, the ambiguity lingers. The sequence subtly raises suspicion among the audience — a suspicion that will only grow as the film unfolds. But should it grow this much? And that goes for many scenes from the film — so many moments are implanted to make the audience doubt; so many conversations, behaviours, and glances, everything always is on the thin line between belief and suspicion, everything is there to make the audience question their judgments and morality. 

The tension reaches its peak in this intimate, loaded moment as Alma and Maggie sit on the staircase, the camera slowly zooms in, transforming the encounter into a choreography of power, hesitation, and secrets. Shadows of Alma’s past hover in the frame, their significance intentionally unclear, leaving the audience in a state of uneasy uncertainty. Recurring close-ups on hands and faces underscore how limited our perspective is — we can only know someone as much as they allow us to.

Throughout the film, the performances are remarkable and nuanced. Julia Roberts delivers one of her most incredible performances in years, embodying Alma’s warmth, mystery, and contradictions. Alma is admired, desired, and feared, yet flawed and unpenetrable; and Roberts navigates these dimensions with subtle, devastating precision. Andrew Garfield is equally transformative, subverting his usual everyman persona. His Hank is disarmingly charming until his true nature is revealed, embodying masculine entitlement and toxic impulses that make his presence deeply unsettling. Ayo Edebiri’s Maggie balances vulnerability with a calculating ambiguity, constantly challenging the audience’s trust (and she gives us one of the best lines from the film — at least for queer people). Guadagnino films her in ways that make us doubt her sincerity, even when we shouldn’t — a deliberate choice underscoring the film’s commentary on credibility, perception, and institutional power.

The film’s visual style reinforces its themes. Malik Hassan Sayeed’s cinematography evokes dark academia aesthetics — rain-soaked streets, shadowy corridors, staircases leading into obscurity — all reinforcing secrecy, moral ambiguity, and hierarchical power. Alma’s home, often filled with tension, becomes a reflection of her inner turmoil, and the ticking clock returns at key moments, suggesting mortality, confrontation, and the finite nature of time — until it stops ticking. For good. Each frame, each visual cue, reinforces the narrative’s thematic complexity and emotional weight.

The climactic confrontations — between Alma and Maggie, and between Alma and Hank — further test our perceptions of truth and complicity. Maggie insists on speaking out, yet she’s holding back, revealing only fragments of the story and keeping the full truth just out of reach, and Alma’s simultaneous doubt reflects real-world complexities: even those who want to do the right thing may struggle with belief, bias, and personal fear. Hank’s presence, charm, and eventual menace underscore the danger of unchecked privilege and toxic masculinity. Guadagnino stages these interactions with formal rigor, using camera movement, close-ups, and editing rhythms to heighten moral and emotional tension, ensuring that the audience experiences uncertainty and discomfort as viscerally as the characters do.

Alma’s own past is also central to the story’s moral and emotional complexity. Guadagnino presents it with careful nuance, framing Alma as flawed, haunted, and human, rather than simply guilty or victimized. Roberts portrays these moments with quiet devastation, making Alma’s inner conflict visceral and impossible to ignore. The film resists moral simplification, showing how trauma, secrecy, and the instinct for self-preservation can ripple across decades, shaping lives in ways both visible and hidden.

The film culminates in a time jump, years later, where Maggie and Alma meet once again. Their conversation is layered with ambiguity, revealing that patterns of secrecy, moral compromise, and partial truths persist. It’s still in every word, every movement, and every glance. Guadagnino leaves these relationships unresolved, emphasizing that truth is never whole but always fractured, shaped by memory, perspective, and power.

After the Hunt is uncomfortable, divisive, and necessary. It provokes, not by offering answers, but by forcing audiences to confront the ways we judge, doubt, and sometimes fail each other. Roberts’s commanding performance, Garfield’s chilling subversion, Edebiri’s layered ambiguity, and Guadagnino’s formal precision converge into a film that insists on discussion long after its final frame.

Ultimately, After the Hunt is about the pursuit of truth — not absolute or tidy truths, but fractured, human ones, shaped by memory, perception, and survival. It reminds us how much easier it is to judge others than to confront our own complicity and mistakes. Guadagnino uses that tension to trap us in uncertainty, showing how silence, secrecy, and doubt can twist morality and blur power. And the film works because of this very discomfort. It leaves audiences genuinely divided, sparking conversations that are just as uneasy as the film itself. That division isn’t a flaw but the point: our society is messy, contradictory, and broken, and nothing is ever black or white. We only see fragments of people’s lives, scattered details, half-truths. Rarely do we get the full picture — and so we question, speculate, and sometimes doubt when we shouldn’t.

Grade: A-

Oscar Prospects:
Likely: None
Should be Considered: Best Actress (Julia Roberts), Supporting Actor (Andrew Garfield)

Release Date: October 10, 2025
Where to Watch: In Theaters