The Premise Sounds Promising
After the Hunt follows a college professor (Roberts) whose life implodes after allegations surface at a dinner party. What actually happened? The film deliberately refuses to tell you. It's Luca Guadagnino tackling #MeToo themes with his signature style and a stacked cast including Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri.
On paper, this should work. Guadagnino knows how to create atmosphere. Roberts can do anything. The subject matter is relevant and provocative. The ambiguity could be powerful - letting the audience grapple with uncomfortable questions about truth, power, and belief.
Instead, it's two hours and eighteen minutes of pretentious academia-speak that mistakes evasion for profundity.
Ambiguity Vs. Evasion
Here's my problem with After the Hunt: there's a difference between deliberate ambiguity and refusing to engage with your own premise.
Good ambiguous storytelling gives you enough information to draw your own conclusions. It trusts the audience to sit with complexity. It presents different perspectives and lets you wrestle with them.
This film just doesn't commit to anything. It raises provocative questions and then spends over two hours refusing to actually explore them. It gestures toward important themes - truth, justice, power dynamics, institutional failure - but never goes deeper than surface-level provocation.
Critics have called it "coy" and "toothless," and they're right. It wants credit for being daring without actually daring anything. It's provocative in theory but safe in execution.
The film never reveals what actually happened. That could be powerful. Instead, it feels like the movie couldn't figure out what it wanted to say, so it said nothing and called it art.
The Academic Jargon Problem
Another massive issue: this film is drowning in academic philosophy speak.
Characters don't talk like humans. They talk like theory-drunk graduate students who've been locked in a seminar room too long. The dialogue is dense with intellectual posturing that sounds smart but says very little.
There's a difference between intelligent dialogue and performative intellectualism. After the Hunt consistently chooses the latter.
It's exhausting. It's alienating. And it's completely at odds with the emotional stakes the film is supposedly exploring. When you're dealing with accusations, careers destroyed, lives upended - people don't speak in abstract philosophical concepts. They speak with urgency, emotion, and messiness.
But Guadagnino seems more interested in how smart he can make his characters sound than in making them feel like actual people.
Ayo Edebiri Shines Despite Everything
One bright spot: Ayo Edebiri proves she's a seriously talented dramatic actor here. Known primarily for comedy (The Bear), she holds her own against Roberts and Garfield, navigating the film's tonal confusion with genuine skill.
She deserves better material, too. But at least she gets to show her range.
It Feels "Very Five Years Ago"
Here's maybe the most damning criticism: After the Hunt feels dated.
Not because #MeToo isn't still relevant - it absolutely is. But because the film's approach to these themes feels like it's from 2018. The conversations have evolved. The discourse has deepened. We've moved past surface-level "what is truth?" handwringing.
The film seems to think it's being bold by refusing to take sides or provide answers. But in 2025, that feels less like courage and more like cowardice. Like the filmmaker is so afraid of saying the wrong thing that he says nothing at all.
When Style Overwhelms Substance
Luca Guadagnino is a visual stylist. That's usually his strength. But here, style completely overwhelms substance - or rather, reveals that there's not much substance to begin with.
Beautiful compositions can't compensate for hollow storytelling. Atmospheric tension means nothing if it's not building toward something. A moody Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score (which critics are calling "annoying") doesn't make your film profound if your script has nothing to say.
After the Hunt looks like an important film. It sounds like an important film. It desperately wants to BE an important film.
But wanting to be important and actually having something important to say are not the same thing.
The Verdict
Julia Roberts gives one of the best performances of her career in After the Hunt, and it's genuinely tragic that it's in service of such a frustrating, pretentious, ultimately hollow film.
She deserved a script that matched her commitment. She deserved a story that actually engaged with its themes rather than just posturing about them. She deserved better than two hours of academic jargon and deliberate evasion masquerading as depth.
If you're a Julia Roberts completist, watch it for her performance. It really is superb.
But don't expect the film around that performance to be worthy of it.
Some movies waste good actors. After the Hunt wastes a great one, delivering career-best work.
And that might be the most frustrating thing about it.