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After The Hunt review: Julia Roberts at her superb best in campus thriller ★★★★
The actor shines as a lecturer caught in the crossfire of a culture war showdown
October 22, 2025 15:05
The actor shines as a lecturer caught in the crossfire of a culture war showdown
October 22, 2025 15:05The typeface of the titles and credits for Luca Guadagnino’s psychological thriller are pure Woody Allen. Indeed, Allen devotees – that is those who have stayed loyal to the director through the unsubstantiated child abuse allegations – could be forgiven for thinking that the cosy curly font heralds a film of comic whimsy centred on a Jewish New Yorker with an over-developed fear of death. They would be wrong.
The typeface really signals that a line in the currently raging culture war has been drawn by Guadagnino. Also that the Italian director is firmly on one side of it. Allen’s side.
In his latest film Julia Roberts is Alma, a brittle, high-flying Yale professor – a performance as commanding as her Erin Brockovich. Alma’s colleague is Andrew Garfield’s Hank, with whom Alma has an uncomfortably flirty friendship even in front of her Jewish psychiatrist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg).
The action begins in earnest during Alma and Frederik’s drinks party, which is fuelled not only by alcohol but by an insatiable appetite for debate. The fuse is lit when Hank asks student Maggie (played by the always interesting Ayo Edebiri) when offending someone become a cardinal sin for her generation. “About the time your generation made sweeping generalisations about our generation,” says Maggie, apparently unaware that she has just made a sweeping generalisation.
This conversational rough and tumble turns nasty when drunk Hank sees Maggie home after the party, after which she accuses him of sexual assault. We are not witness to the alleged event. Alma is caught in the middle; between a duty of care for her student and her fondness for Hank.
Roberts is at her superb best when conveying mute scepticism for the opposing parties. In these moments her still arrestingly open face turns to stone and becomes as closed as a slamming door.
It is an expression seen first with Maggie, the queer student who seems to embrace the role of black victim of her old white male’s behaviour with too much alacrity for Alma’s liking. Then we see it again with Hank during his protests of innocence. Here one can imagine Hank enthusiastically agreeing with the line in Woody Allen’s new novel What’s With Baum? “In today’s culture an accusal is as good as a conviction.”
Nora Garrett’s script is smart and thrillingly articulate. But there are missteps such as when Hank is fired unfeasibly quickly, seemingly for the convenience of plot. And although the question of Hank’s guilt is cleverly handled (I don’t want to give more away than that) Garfield loads the dice too much with his touchy and all-too-feely body language. Equally overblown is Stuhlbarg’s Frederik and his performative eruptions of arch indignation.
Still, this is the most gripping attempt to explore the fissure between generations and their attitudes since Mamet’s 1992 play Oleanna. A response to political correctness, it too focused on a college professor accused buy a female student of sexual impropriety and was where the first shots in the culture war were fired.
Cert 15
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