Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt (2025) has been the subject of much discussion and debate since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Centered on the #MeToo movement and the broader discourse around cancel culture, the film stars Julia Roberts as Alma Imhoff, a Yale professor navigating the aftermath of her star mentee accusing another faculty member of sexual assault. While audiences have fixated on the controversy of its subject matter, After the Hunt is, at its core, a rich script penned by Nora Garrett featuring a deeply introspective and complex character study that offers an exploration of moral ambiguity if only audiences would be willing to engage with it.
Ahead of its release, After the Hunt’s promotions advertised it as a provocative, “he-said-she-said” thriller. The trailer’s opening line speaks directly to the audience, saying, “all your generation, you’re scared of saying the wrong thing. When did offending someone become the preeminent cardinal sin?” and seemingly announcing the film as a lecture on cancel culture.
Like many, I dreaded seeing this film, believing it to be a self-indulgent commentary from Hollywood elites—tone-deaf, detached, and irresponsible to those actually impacted by abuse and power. Like many viewers, I entered the film with a skewed view of what I was about to watch. I let go of my preconceived notions of the film and allowed myself to enter into a story not about scandal, but about the psychological unraveling of oneself as explored through Alma Imhoff (Roberts).
Guadagnino and Garrett smartly use the #MeToo movement not as the film’s focus but as its frame. They zoom in on something often forgotten in our current online era—the individuals at the center of these stories. It’s a bold choice that forces viewers to sit with discomfort and to acknowledge the grayness that exists between guilt and innocence. Crucially, they do so without minimizing the pain at the heart of sexual assault or the necessity of accountability. Instead, they reorient the conversation toward empathy, perception, and the complexities of selfhood through the aftermath of trauma.
The grayness in After the Hunt doesn’t come from trying to understand Henrik (Andrew Garfield), the accused colleague—whose guilt the film subtly confirms—nor from doubting the survivor, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). Instead, it lies in how Guadagnino and Garrett give agency and complexity to the female characters.
Both Alma and Maggie are complicated, imperfect, and wounded. They are not without fault, but also capable of fragility and forgiveness. They are both characters who have experienced trauma, which Guadagingo and Garrett do an excellent job of forcing you to contemplate how that informs their action. You almost feel guilty for judging them—and yet, you can’t help it.
Alma’s unraveling begins when her own buried trauma begins to surface. She is brilliant and knows it. Her intellect veers into condescension, her confidence into ego. Her husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), tells her that she is not “unfeeling,” while Alma reminds him that no one thought her unfeeling until he said it—a subconscious slip-up perhaps, and a much more telling perception of the character.
As the film lingers on Alma—her anxiety, her pain, her physical unraveling, charting the course of her own self-imposed destruction—we come to understand her contradictions. She’s not malicious, but she is human– flawed, proud, and terrified of being seen as anything less than good.
Alma processes the accusations and fallout around her while quietly confronting her own biases and desires that cloud her judgment. Roberts delivers one of her most introspective performances to date, revealing Alma’s contradictions through every hesitation and glance. It is as if every word she says, she immediately regrets, while also completely assured of herself. The contradictions of self, of who we are and who we should try to be as defined by society, and the unease of our own desires for self-actualization versus fear of misperception, manifest themselves in this character, and slowly become her unraveling.
It is thrilling to see Roberts take on a character like Alma and see her thrive in the hands of Guadagnino. I long for many more collaborations between the two, and would argue this has the potential for an awards push if Amazon MGM plays its cards right.
At the center of this unraveling is Alma’s relationship with Maggie. On the surface, Alma offers mentorship and guidance, but as Frederik points out, she’s drawn to Maggie’s admiration and worship of her. Similarly, Maggie’s pursuit of Alma’s attention begins to blur her motives. She craves justice, yes, but also validation. You question her motives; her presence becomes uncomfortable. She is not a perfect victim, which is precisely the point the film is making.
This is where the film’s moral grayness is most potent and feels most daring. A lesser script might have centered sympathy on the assailant (Garfield), but After the Hunt resists that entirely. The alleged assault becomes almost peripheral.
I would also argue this is precisely because the film is written by a woman, a point that I feel has been neglected in conversations around it. While audiences are so focused on the film condemning actions, fitting into a binary, viewers have completely overlooked the complex dynamic between Alma and Maggie, which makes the film much more groundbreaking and interesting than a simple tale of “he-said-she-said.”
After the Hunt becomes far more than a topical drama. It becomes a meditation on judgment itself—how we decide who is good, who is bad, and what we lose when we cling too tightly to either label. The film does not condemn Alma or Maggie, nor does it absolve them. It simply observes. And in doing so, audiences remember that everyone is not without fault. The question isn’t whether we fall short but what happens when our failings are dragged into the light. Alma spirals in that exposure. She isn’t innocent, but she isn’t monstrous either. The film forces us to hold both truths at once—to understand her while also despising her, to feel empathy for her collapse without absolving it.
By the film’s end, it is implied that Alma delivered a public apology. She is now a dean at Yale. She reconnects with Maggie, who no longer mirrors her—her hair natural and her style her own. The moment feels performative, false politeness. Neither woman has fully processed her part in what transpired, and yet both seem to think they have and are in the right, whatever right means.
Ultimately, After the Hunt asks us to question how we define “goodness” and whether that definition can ever hold. We all strive for moral integrity, yet we’re capable of harm—sometimes on a grand scale, sometimes in quiet, interpersonal ways. Guadagnino and Garrett use the most explosive social backdrop possible to explore a subtler truth that self-righteousness and self-loathing often share a border. It reminds us that empathy is not forgiveness, but understanding—that even those we judge are still human, still capable of pain, and still haunted by the desire to be seen as worthy of grace.
It’s almost poetic that the conversation surrounding After the Hunt—and even its own marketing—has, in a way, sabotaged the film. Framed as a provocative take on cancel culture, it was never allowed to exist in the moral grayness it so thoughtfully inhabits. That feels fitting, almost meta. In our collective pursuit to appear faultless—to say the right thing, to be perceived as good—we deny ourselves, and especially women, the space to be complicated.
The same scrutiny audiences impose on the film mirrors the impossible standards the film itself interrogates. Nora Garrett’s script and the women she writes are not granted the grace to simply exist. This is not to say they should not be judged or faulted, but it seems they are critiqued to a much heavier degree in the world, and even subconsciously by audience members, than the actual men deserving of it.
It feels as if audiences are somewhat missing the point, creating their own misconceived notion of the film instead of actually engaging with the material. This stands out to me even more, given it is a story with complex female characters and a female-written script directed by a queer man. Are we not allowing this story the same nuance we allowed straight, white male stories to have?
Much like Alma or Maggie, this film is not allowed to exist within the gray. It must live up to impossibly high standards. After the Hunt is precisely the kind of story we need, yet we resist it, projecting our discomfort onto the work rather than sitting with what it reveals about us. In that resistance lies the film’s most haunting truth—that the quest to be beyond reproach often leads to our own undoing.
Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt is far more than the provocative “cancel culture” drama its marketing suggests—it’s a deeply introspective character study about morality, power, and self-deception in the age of #MeToo.
Review Courtesy of Kam Ryan
Feature Image Credit to Amazon MGM