After the Hunt: Luca Guadagnino’s Culture of Self-Promotion Through Debate

Unremitting chatter had, in Luca Guadagnino’s decadent cinema up to now, actually hardly any room. Perhaps it is the setting that is to blame for spoken words occupying such space for the first time: “After the Hunt” is set at Yale University and follows on and off campus the entanglements of characters who teach and study at the philosophy faculty.

The intellectual debating thus belongs to the professional profile of the close friends Alma (Julia Roberts) and Hank (Andrew Garfield). Both have dedicated themselves to the goal of obtaining a hard-wought tenured position. And that it evidently requires not only particular intellectual brilliance but above all the public display of it, is already suggested by the opening.

Whether it also requires the “right” worldview or even identity is provocatively posed as well. At a small soirée in an exclusive circle that Alma invited, they discuss questions of ethics in the broad sense and political correctness in the narrower sense. For example, whether thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud should be read again because of their “problematic” biographies or statements.

Alma and Hank contradict each other and yet are popular with their students. They bask in their admiration—and seem to cherish it for each other as well. Alma’s greatest devotee, however, is her doctoral student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), who immediately engages in a verbal duel in defense of her mentor.

A fellow student asserts that if a decision between Hank and Alma must be made for the job, of course she will win the prize—because she is a woman and the white, heterosexual cis man is now being systematically disadvantaged just as he had been favored before. Maggie counters that one might question his power in the discourse, but in practice it remains unshaken.

Loaded Buzzwords

With this, the social rifts are drawn: at least on the surface, “After the Hunt” revolves around loaded buzzwords such as “Cancel Culture” and “Identity Politics,” around debates on “Diversity” and “Wokeness.” Yet the game with the façade—what is debated on the surface and what is really at stake—is, since at least “Challengers” (a mirage of a sports drama), the director’s new signature.

What Luca Guadagnino keeps returning to, albeit in a different guise each time, is the longing and the hunger for interpersonal connection—driven by characters so moved by inner yearning that they can do nothing but follow it.

How large the director’s sympathy for this entanglement with desire is becomes clear not least in the iconophilic compositions with which he outfits his characters, lending them a visual tenderness even in moments of morally ambivalent action. In “After the Hunt” such tenderness is lacking simply because such entanglement does not exist here. Only Alma’s husband (Michael Stuhlbarg), a psychoanalyst, functions as a melancholic voice of truth—so to speak, as an “authentic relief” in a plot weave that otherwise knows only suppression.

Alma, Hank and Maggie care above all about their own professional advancement, and about the still more prosaic want to stand tall. “After the Hunt,” written by Nora Garrett, tests this on a volatile case: after the aforementioned evening, Maggie turns to Alma and reports a sexual assault by Hank. Alma confronts him—he denies it and counters with plagiarism accusations against Maggie’s dissertation, which she now tries to conceal. Far more than clarity, Alma worries about the possible consequences for herself.

Class versus Identity

The film itself remains vague about the actual events. Discursively, however, what is hinted from the start crystallizes: Hank appeals to Alma on his “class.” He will not let upward ascent be derailed by a self-righteous scion from a wealthy family.

Because Alma does not follow his accounts uncritically, Maggie accuses her doctoral mentor in public as another white woman who would abandon a Black, furthermore queer woman at a decisive moment. Even in the clash between “class” and “identity,” the film does not take a clear position; instead it exposes the social fissures that arise when such arguments are wielded not from conviction but as strategic weapons in the field.

In this, “After the Hunt” ultimately proves to be, without a doubt, a Luca Guadagnino film: at its core it is a reckoning with hypocrisy itself, embodied by figures who are only concerned with their reputation and flee from inner truths that are so central in his work.

Above all, however, “After the Hunt” deftly engages social tensions and even provokes gripping discussions. Precisely because the film does not aim to please, but dares to embrace ambiguities that some viewers may find exhausting. Yet, as the film itself says: “Not everything is meant to make you feel comfortable.”