We live in a time where watching your words has never been more essential. Even the simplest of statements, or a joke delivered to the wrong audience, could land someone in a position where their entire reputation is at stake, and sometimes even entirely tarnished. My personal thoughts on the issue are complex and layered, but also not particularly relevant to this discussion, which instead centres around After the Hunt, the most recent directorial outing of the highly prolific Luca Guadagnino, who works from a screenplay by Nora Garrett, which is set in Yale and follows the trials and tribulations of Alma Olsson, a well-respected intellectual and academic in the Department of Philosophy who is happy in her position – she’s on her way to receiving long-overdue tenure, has the affection of her students and the support of her loving husband, who looks the other way when her friendship with the young wunderkind Henrik Gibson, the faculty’s wunderkind and someone who is almost as beloved as his colleague and best friend. All of this comes crashing down when an accusation of sexual assault is levelled against him by a student, who also happens to be one of Alma’s star doctoral candidates, which evokes discussion on whether these events actually transpired, or if it is just an effort to get revenge after a poorly-timed debate in which the student’s skills were questioned. Suddenly, Alma is plunged into a state of conflict – does she take the side of a clearly shaken, traumatised student, or her longtime colleague? These difficult choices lay the foundation for a film that becomes a sprawling examination of themes that are highly resonant with a lot of contemporary discussions, After the Hunt should hypothetically be a much better film, particularly in how it addresses the concepts from a number of different angles – but its lack of ambition or authorial identity are just a couple of the shortcomings that highlight just how shallow and surface-level this film is in practice, despite its best intentions to be far more challenging.

The term “cancel culture” has become a mainstay in the global vocabulary, regardless of the attempts to suppress the concept by those who are not particularly enamoured with the idea being a widespread part of the global cultural landscape. Regardless of the divide, it is important to discuss the concept of accountability and how society can sometimes determine whether someone deserves to be given a second chance, based on their standing within the community, the veracity of the accusations against them, and the severity of their wrongdoing. With these concepts lingering as the primary focus, Guadagnino did have quite a challenge ahead of him when crafting After the Hunt, a film that feels like it should have been much bolder and insightful than it manages to be in practice. Guadagnino has seemingly been proud of his ability to blend traditional narrative structures with more modern elements, having a firm grasp on the collective cultural pulse and knowing exactly where to draw our attention, a skill that even his sceptics find difficult to ignore. In theory, this should have been the foundation for a much stronger film – and in many ways, we do wish that the director had been able to find ways to explore these topics in more detail, especially since the premise of After the Hunt has a lot of promise. Set within the cutthroat world of academia (which is far less copacetic and pleasant than we may expect – anyone who has peered behind the curtains on how universities and colleges function will know this for a fact), the film attempts to focus on a character caught between professional and personal crises, questioning her own position as both a colleague and a mentor in a situation she finds impossible to navigate. Through this, the film comments on power dynamics, the importance of setting aside reputation in favour of honesty, and the impossible burden of morality – and only partially succeeds in exploring each one.

As we’ve come to expect from him (and no doubt made possible by his ongoing ascent to being one of the most desired directors working in the industry right now), Guadagnino assembles quite an impressive cast to bring After the Hunt to life. It features a solid performance from Julia Roberts, who may not be delivering the powerhouse performance we may expect, but still brings a sense of reliability to a character that could have been hopelessly unlikable in the hands of someone else. She’s stately and stoic, maintaining her composure wherever possible, but not being too stone-faced to lose the impact found in those moments where her character’s mask begins to crack. It’s not the best work Roberts has done in her career (especially since Alma is far from charismatic, a quality that is very important in Roberts’ best performances), but it’s consistent enough to be a good anchor for this film. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is not quite as successful. Ayo Edebiri makes a few bold swings in one of her first major dramatic performance (her work on The Bear has a lot of serious moments, but it is a mostly comedic role), and while we can appreciate her talents and the effort, the character is too thinly-written to fully encapsulate her gifts, making her nothing more than a forgettable supporting player that borders on unlikable, the opposite of how we should feel about this character. Michael Stuhlbarg is very fun as Roberts’ husband, who seems to go through life as a series of mood swings – but as compelling as he may be as a performer, the choices he makes (or rather is led to make) are questionable, especially when he’s one of the most genuinely interesting characters in the film. Andrew Garfield does his best to play this man whose life comes crashing down in a moment, and he’s probably the best performance in the film – but ultimately, After the Hunt has very little time to develop its protagonists, so expecting them to do the same for a character positioned as the villain (albeit a pathetic one) is asking too much. None of the performances are bad, but they don’t manage to elevate a film that should have been a much stronger character study throughout.

Mercifully, After the Hunt is not a film that wastes time in establishing its key approach, which means that we learn relatively soon the extent to which we can take this film seriously, or how much of it is actually going to be effective. Perhaps we have grown too critical as a society, since a few decades ago, this kind of mid-level psychological thriller would be far more endearing – but with the prestige attached to it, we are quite correct in expecting something more polished, and certainly justified in being disappointed in the final product. The root cause of the problems that plague this film are found in the tone – it takes itself so seriously, and while the themes of sexual assault and psychological violence are not comedic fodder, the manner in which the film positions itself as some stark, complex morality tale can sometimes have the opposite effect, coming across as overly vainglorious and scolding, particularly in how it treats its characters as nothing more than pawns in a game of chess being played by societal forces, moving one step at a time in a manner that can only be described as frustratingly robotic. It also doesn’t know what point it is trying to convey – do we need to see this situation through Alma’s perspective, scrambling to understand how someone can struggle in this position? Or are we asked to choose a side, and then patiently wait to see whether our chosen interpretation was the right one? In either case, the results are not all that effective, and the dour tone just drags the film further down. It unfortunately struggles to find the right atmosphere and eventually succumbs to being nothing more than a bundle of heavy-handed moments, not complex enough to keep us engaged, and lacking any real skill, which is surprising considering the director is someone whose style is always compelling, even when the story doesn’t match. There’s a shroud of dullness that covers After the Hunt – grey and beige abound in everything from the architecture to the clothing, and the dialogue is stilted at the best of times, outrageous at the worst. While we can credit the latter to the screenplay being written by someone relatively new to the industry, but its inexcusable for Guadagnino to make something so visually flat and lacking in any kind of aesthetic beauty, which may have been all that could have been done to elevate a relatively bland, lifeless script.

One of the few positive statements we can make about After the Hunt is that it underlines Guadagnino’s versatility – this is the same director who has (this decade alone) made a cannibal romance in Bones and All, a comedic sports comedy in Challengers and a bold adaptation of an impossible literary classic in Queer – all films that are wildly different from one another, and certainly benefitting from a director who refuses to pigeonhole himself into a particular style. Yet, even with this praise, there comes the caveat that his desire to cast a wide net in terms of tones and genres does mean that his authorial voice is lost in the shuffle – he’s simply a director-for-hire, brought on to visualise the work of screenwriters, rather than forging his own style in the process. After the Hunt is a film that needed someone who knew how to take Garrett’s screenplay (which was rife with cliches, but still had potential), investigating each harrowing recess in vivid detail, rather than someone who just condensed it into about a dozen sub-plots, none of which lead anywhere in particular, other than a third act that is so overly drawn out, consisting of a few different points in which we genuinely believe the film is coming to a close (and where it probably should have taken the cue), only to be met by further scenes that not only strip the film of whatever paltry merits it had by the end, but also add very little to the narrative. It’s a middling film at the best of times, and one that is neither going to detract from Guadagnino’s status as one of the best filmmakers of his generation, nor add to his body of work in any significant way. It’s not a very good film, and we discover quite early that After the Hunt is not going to do much in terms of realising its potential. It does squander quite a good cast and misses the opportunity to do something interesting with the material, leading to a film that achieves very little, despite the strength of its ideas that deserved much better execution.