After The Hunt… For Good Writing: A Nothingburgers Movie
- Jessy Sun
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
I had the privilege of attending the BFI London Film Festival this year, and one of the films I saw was After the Hunt (2025). I entered Royal Festival Hall with very little idea of what the film was actually about, with no expectations, perhaps only the anticipation of watching something thought-provoking. A good film can make you feel and ponder endlessly; this one made me feel absolutely nothing, and I left the theatre confused and head empty.
The film strives for depth, importance and cultural omniscience, but it instead boils down into a shapeless and spineless movie about victimhood, sexual assault, rape culture, cancel culture, race, feminism, academia, generational gaps, trauma, exploitation, identity politics … it preys on too much, so it fails to grasp onto anything meaningful. Hence, it makes for a weirdly ambiguous film that is also desperate for attention, making it incredibly hard to watch. In a pursuit of subtlety and nuance, we end up with proximity to a mish-mash of ideas but no actual contact. It does not help that Luca Guadagnino’s direction is equally confused.
Set in 2019, we follow Alma Imhoff, an esteemed philosophy professor at Yale who is intimidating, perfectly manicured and ambitious. She is up for tenure and has a devoted husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), who is a therapist. Her top PhD student Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), doesn’t know if she wants to be her or be with her, and Hank ‘everybody-loves-Hank’ Gibson (Andrew Garfield) is a charming colleague and close friend who is then accused of sexual assault by Maggie. Here, we see the mess implode in itself as the characters dance around each other, revealing their worst faces to each other and the community.
We are introduced to Maggie and Hank in a particularly draining party scene that seems never-ending. The insufferability of the characters in this film is established immediately; they talk in nonsensical loops of philosophical jargon and quibble about the generational gap between Gen X and Gen Z, as the script throws in repetitive sentiments about feminism and wokeism. In the midst of all this conversation, the character dynamics are established. Maggie is politely disconnected; Alma is a little too close to Hank and vice versa; Frederik is both amused and defeated by this; and fellow faculty member Dr Kim Sayers (Chloë Sevigny) quietly scrutinises. The philosophical talk is only compelling when it enters the classroom–for example, the clash between Alma and one of her students (Thaddea Graham) when discussing the literary ‘other’ is riveting–but in most cases it is at best rigid and at worst downright ostentatious.
In an attempt to navigate what it means to be ‘a perfect victim’, the film depicts Alma and Maggie as unlikeable women, but in different ways. Alma is sharp, cold and ungrateful, as she has the perfect husband, job, and status, yet struggles with her own trauma, which manifests in her treatment towards both her husband and Maggie. At the end of the film, Alma’s response to Maggie and the entire situation is explained by a pretty intense lore drop, which establishes her as the only character in this film with any depth. Maggie is widely disliked; Frederik thinks she is an unimpressive wannabe, Hank calls her privileged, as her parents are wealthy donors to Yale. She plagiarised her dissertation; she is curt, stubborn and unfriendly. Then the film poses the question of whether she is deserving of our sympathy. I find this to be a very rudimentary perspective, as if her entitlement and privilege contradict her ability to be raped. It is a notable crux of the film, but thematically, it is not worth pondering on at all. An equally confusing part of the film is the way Maggie’s non-binary partner, Alex, is portrayed. Alma explicitly tells Maggie that her relationship with Alex is performative, using them to gain social capital, and I merely question if this is something that even occurs in real life, and why non-binary characters are always tokenised in these types of intellectual drama films in order to prove a point. No point was proven, regrettably.
Evidently, filmmakers should not shy away from engaging with divisive or sensitive topics, as art is political and does reflect our status quo. There is also no objective way to approach a topic or theme. However, this film is not interested in investigating anything in a deep capacity. We are left with surface-level understandings of most characters, a disjointed narrative and shallow perspectives on its themes. It is just discourse after discursive discourse over and over again, too concerned with its own self-importance that it just feels disdainfully lofty. Simultaneously overdramatic and under-dramatic, it does not let any of the discomfort linger long enough to emotionally resonate. Even among moments that may hit the emotional hay, the film then takes another thoughtless jab at some demographic that just leaves you wondering what the film is even trying to achieve. Roberts and Garfield are incredibly compelling and, without a doubt, are trying their best with the script. They deliver certain lines with such emotional impact, which just shows what the film could have been. Edebiri, who is great in many of her other projects, is simply just fine in this. Michael Stuhlbarg breathes air into the suffocating script, and his presence in a Guadagnino film is always much appreciated.
The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is especially conflicting. On one hand, the dissonant piano is very effective in building tension in particular scenes. On the other, a lot of it is discordant and too strange; it is distracting from what is happening on screen, and perhaps too experimental. The ticking clock that appears throughout the film is especially aggravating. Guadagnino’s direction is also erratic; there are several gorgeous shots with great framing, but the hand kinesics and strange angles of the camera are definitely a choice. His style works for the stylish and sexy Challengers (2023) and the surrealist Queer (2024), but it is jarring in a serious drama like this. Given the contentious nature of the themes at hand, the film's direction is weirdly grandiose yet dull. It has some funny moments, courtesy of Michael Stuhlbarg and his inherent whimsy, but the plot drags itself through mud.
Unfortunately, the film is too messy for its own good. It is not messy in a stimulating way that leaves you digesting the themes, but messy in a hollow way where all technical aspects of the film are constantly contradicting themselves. I said earlier that I left the theatre head-empty, but the one thing I do wonder is: how could this film be different? I can see what the movie was trying to do, but the script is too incurious about anything, and the lens does not know if it wants to be narrow or wide. An attempt at depicting our ‘current culture’ (whatever that means) is always difficult because there is no way of genuinely encapsulating the social media-ridden, generationally divided, post-# MeToo Movement landscape without some mishaps. I can, however, applaud the intention and the journey, regardless of the blunders the film makes along the way.
Edited by Lara Walsh, Co-Film & TV Editor
