Teeter totter stays down. Challengers shot us WAY up in the air, but then Queer brought us back down a little bit. After the Hunt plants us back to the ground. We’re in bad Luca Guadagnino territory; here’s hoping only Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri get sucked into the vortex, and everyone else is left alone. Never good to follow Zendaya or Daniel Craig, lessons learned.
At a Yale Philosophy Department soiree, our 3 principles are in deep conversation. Alma Inhoff (Julia Roberts), the host and professor, is happy to sit quietly and watch her pupils spar. One is the magnetic Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), co-writing papers with Alma to the point he’s the hotshot professor too, up for tenure like Alma. And the newest protegee is Maggie Resnick, daughter of a rich benefactor, and a huge fan of Alma’s. Alma’s path to tenure gets rocked though right after the party, as Maggie, drenched, arrives on Alma’s doorstep, telling her mentor that Hank “crossed a line,” forcing Alma to figure out what to do and who to trust.
So that sounds like a pulpy fun ride right? After Challengers, I thought Luca Guadagnino might have cracked some code and really found his niche in some sort of thrillerland. Instead, this movie gets lost in thought like a lot of philosophy majors. We spend an insane amount of time just debating philosophy theory, but really just saying “kids are dumb and we’ll never understand them.” Wow, brilliant lesson dude. Even tougher when there might be actual things to learn from them here that would get Alma and others not caught up in the mess. Maybe Luca realized he had nothing, so he uses set design and beautiful cinematography and score to distract us from the BS. But at some point the story has to matter for the movie to work at all, and it never really does, really falling apart as multiple endings and an incoherent coda take us well over 2 hours.
And because I don’t think Luca knows what he wants neither does his cast. Julia Roberts fares best, giving a solid physical performance on top of an emotional one to anchor the movie around. Andrew Garfield choose capital A acting for his performance, giving a lot of unnecessary energy that’s more distracting than good. Michael Stuhlbarg is in a domestic drama, bringing more weird than anyone else. And poor Ayo Edebiri doesn’t have good enough material to deliver what this movie needs her to; I would have preferred Mikey Madison or Sydney Sweeney, someone that feels like they can manipulate everyone around them. Instead she comes off just naive and aloof, and can’t really sell the stuff Maggie is going through emotionally.
Hopefully we see good Luca sometime soon. In the meantime, maybe turn After the Hunt into a drinking game. When someone mentions generational misunderstandings, do a shot of beer. You’ll probably drink 5 or 6 by the time the film ends. About as drunk as you need to be to enjoy this hot garbage.