After the Hunt Review: BFI London Film Festival 2025

The latest from Luca Guadagnino, After the Hunt is a dark and twisty tale about misconduct in academia

Alma (Julia Roberts) is a leading professor of philosophy at Yale University, with Hank (Andrew Garfield) her adoring assistant professor and Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) her favourite pupil. After The Hunt opens with Alma holding court at a dinner party thrown by her psychiatrist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) where she absolutely humiliates a male student who dares to suggest that women now have a leg up in academia due to positive discrimination.

Alma and Hank are both up for the same promotion, and as they are closer friends than most colleagues could ever be, they insist that the competition for the job will not come between them. When Maggie accuses Hank of assaulting her, she assumes that Alma, her favourite teacher and one of the few women in the department, will automatically take her side. But Alma’s reaction to the accusation is not what Maggie would have hoped, and soon a whole host of secrets threatens to destroy the careers of these two academics.

After the Hunt is the latest film from Italian director Luca Guadagnino, following on from such great successes as Call Me by Your Name and Challengers, and last year’s significantly more abstract work, Queer. While much of Guadagnino’s work for the past 10 years has been on the subject of romantic love in it’s often twisted and complicated forms, here he turns his attentions to the dark side of academia and the clash between attitudes of different generations.

There’s some deliciously knotty, controversial identity politics being raised in After the Hunt. All of the older academics lament that the privileged younger generation are too woke for words, needs constant coddling and wouldn’t know real hardship if it slapped them in the face – something older generations have been saying about the younger since time immemorial. Chloe Sevigny’s therapist character quips that all of her Gen Z patients seem to be desperate to be victimised just so they can then build their entire lives around that victimhood. ‘’Whatever happened to just stuffing everything down, moving on and developing a drinking problem later in life like we all did?’’

Ayo Edebiri’s Maggie frequently relates her experience as a victim back to the disadvantage she experiences as a young black woman moving in institutions that are run by old white men. But Maggie is also part of a billionaire family that owns and controls most of the university. There’s a question here surrounding the interplay of race and privilege – can Maggie really claim to be downtrodden whilst also holding crushing financial power and influence over her teachers? How do these two experiences co-exist?

Unfortunately, After the Hunt’s narrative is far too muddled to dig into any of these threads with any satisfying amount of depth or resolution, it flirts with these conversations without ever taking any concrete point of view, as if too afraid to commit to its controversy. Meanwhile, it often loses the thread entirely with long sojourns into philosophising and educational grandstanding. It’s unusually restrained film-making from the usually outrageous Guadagnino.

One of the defining characteristics of Julia Roberts’ Alma is her aloofness and refusal to let anyone know anything about her personal life – not her colleagues, her students, or even her long-suffering husband, who seems to love and hate her at alternate turns. It leads to her character arc being cryptically confusing, as we are left with far too many unanswered questions about her influences and motivations.

What excites me about After the Hunt is the series of electrifying, confrontational conversations that happen throughout it. Alma’s cross-examination of Hank in an Indian restaurant, where he insists upon his innocence while stuffing his face with garlic naan, is the closest I’ve ever seen the eternally charming Andrew Garfield come to being slimy.

Her absolute verbal evisceration of Maggie in a public courtyard, when the two women finally stop being polite and just say what they really think of each other, is the highlight of the film. Where so much of our time has been taken up with faux intellectual philosophising and talking in theoretical circles, when the gloves finally come off, this film finally becomes engrossing.

After The Hunt is superbly acted and has some fantastic dialogue, but it feels like a shadow of the film it could have been. While there are some truly brilliant scenes between these acting powerhouses, the whole thing fails to come together as an impactful whole, and it fails to leave any lasting impression about what it’s actually trying to say once the credits roll. More of these deliciously twisty roles for Julia Roberts, though, please – she’s back on superstar form here.

After the Hunt is playing as part of the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in UK cinemas on 22nd October 2025 before moving to Prime Video later in the year.

Check out more reviews from the 2025 London Film Festival here