When Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in late August, it was greeted with some of the most divided reviews of the filmmaker’s career. Critics (candidly, including myself) were impressed by the performances and filmmaking but left bewildered by first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett’s muddled screenplay that tackles post-#MeToo society, privilege, and power in the academic world. Reviews were, generally speaking, mixed to negative, with a few standouts.
A month later, the film arrived as the opening night gala at the New York Film Festival. So how did his topical drama, about a Yale philosophy professor (Julia Roberts) tied up in her Black student’s (Ayo Edebiri) sexual assault accusation against a white colleague (Andrew Garfield), play at NYFF?
It opened the highbrow two-week program, overseen by artistic director and former film critic Dennis Lim and managing director Matt Bolish, last Friday at Alice Tully Hall. Past Guadagnino films to play NYFF include “Queer,” “Bones and All,” and “Call Me by Your Name” — all of which scored better receptions throughout their run than “After the Hunt” has so far.
But can new word-of-mouth — not necessarily good, but at the very least new — boost “After the Hunt” at this point?
A sampling of mostly millennial critics and journalists at Friday night’s “After the Hunt” premiere that I spoke with at the official after-party at Tavern on the Green on the edges of Central Park, were also left cold by the movie. It runs long at just shy of 2 hours and 20 minutes, and one journalist I talked to said that, while the film wasn’t necessarily boring, its length led them to feel the pains of an incoherent narrative. There are plot elements that don’t always add up or seem easily ascribed to recognizable human behavior (such as why Julia Roberts’ character Alma keeps a picture that’s extremely revealing about a past secret taped under her bathroom vanity, rather than in the pied-à-terre she maintains as a private office).
But a colleague I’d spoken to who’d had a look at an earlier draft of the screenplay said that many elements were different in that script — including that very one. So we’re curious to hear from screenwriter Garrett about what changed and why.
The film, however, has its admirers, including another critic who appreciated what they felt was its astute look at how trauma is processed differently across generations. (Alma, it’s implied, is twice Edebiri’s character’s age.) “After the Hunt,” intended as Amazon MGM Studios’ big horse in the Oscar race this year, might not make it all the way to the Academy Awards despite hopes for Julia Roberts returning to the Best Actress category since she won in 2001 for “Erin Brockovich.” (Her last Oscar nomination altogether was for Supporting Actress in 2014 for “August: Osage County.”)
But where the movie could remain a player is the HFPA-dismantled Golden Globes, a handful of whose international spectrum of voters attended a packed press conference during the film’s weekend global junket. There, journalists (both in the room and joining via Zoom) asked engaging questions that Roberts and her cast and creative team praised — she was not having it at the Venice Film Festival, particularly when the first question asked at that Italian presser was, “Why does this movie undermine feminism?”
Roberts is a Globes darling, nominated most recently in 2023 for TV’s similarly on-topic “Gaslit” as Martha Mitchell. She’s won three times from 10 nominations, and the capaciousness of having two categories (Musical/Comedy and Drama) for Best Actress gives her room to play in. “After the Hunt” has a shot at playing better for two core audiences — the international coterie, and the Gen X or boomer audiences who didn’t necessarily come of age with such proximity to the topics investigated in this American film — many of which reflect the makeup of the 300-some Golden Globes body.
Amazon MGM Studios opens “After the Hunt” in select theaters on Friday, October 10 followed by a nationwide release on Friday, October 17. How it plays for non-trade critics will factor into its eventual theatrical business. And when the film eventually reaches Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service, fans of Edebiri, Roberts, Garfield, and Guadagnino can tune in with little risk, and share thoughts and soundbites and viral clips of the movie on social media, where it may well find an entirely new life.
