After the Hunt (2025) ‘Venice Film Festival’ Review: This Cancel-Culture Thriller is an Empty Discourse Dud

After the Hunt is all bark and no bite. It might have the best tagline of the year – “Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable” – but there’s nothing dangerous or controversial here. Luca Guagnino’s latest doesn’t live up to its mantra. It’s not an uncomfortable experience, just a frustrating one. For all its build-up and tension, it doesn’t so much push buttons as it mashes its palm on the keyboard in superficial, performative attempts at provocation.

The whole affair starts with a cold open of sorts, a montage of Julia Roberts’ philosophy professor going about her day to the sound of an overbearing clock ticking. Then the titles and the opening act: a raucous, classy, booze-fueled dinner party hosted by Roberts as Alma and her psychoanalyst husband Frederick, played by an always reliable Michael Stuhlbarg.

Alma is sitting next to, and perhaps entirely too intimately with, colleague Hank, with whom she’s competing for tenure. Played by Andrew Garfield, Hank is an arrogant, somewhat bitter academic whose oft-cited working-class origins allow him to sneer at his overprivileged students. Early on, Stuhlbarg’s Frederick puts forward what seems like it will be the film’s main conflict: can Alma and Hank’s friendship survive the bitter tenure contest, and when one of them gets what they’ve always wanted, will they be happy?

Also commanding attention at the party is Maggie—the department’s rising star, whose brilliance is matched only by her status as the BIPOC colleague her white peers watch with wary admiration, and whose family wealth, funneled through generous donations, could make any academic salivate. Her discomfort in this space is clear before her scion-origins are known.

Fleeing to the bathroom to escape the passive-aggressive debates of defensive men, she uses the master bathroom, uncovering a secret before returning to the fray. A very drunk Hank gushes that Maggie’s thesis is supposedly brilliant. Maggie agrees to let her walk him home. The next morning, their stories spread widely.

This is where After the Hunt sets off. The hunt portion is swift, and the lingering aftermath should be ripe for internal chaos, but the film oddly never gets going. Some secrets are exposed through clunky exposition, others left hanging. From the beginning, there is an arch tone that hints that this might be Guadagnino back in A Bigger Splash mode or bridging his horror impulses with a timely social thriller, but the film flits around, unable to pin down its actual themes or what it wants to say about the contentious issues it constantly pokes at.

A still from After the Hunt (2025). — A still from “After the Hunt” (2025).

After the Hunt might be Guadagnino’s worst film, or the worst since I Am Love brought him to more international attention. It’s the first of his recent works that feels like a misfire, an entirely unsuccessful attempt to do what it’s trying to do or say what it’s trying to say. It belongs to an unfortunate class of film that’s well-made but hollow, becoming less than the sum of its parts through lazy storytelling and clumsy attempts at social relevance. It evokes other recent films, particularly House of Dynamite and Eddington, in wrapping itself in urgency and timeliness to avoid making actual narrative and thematic choices.

Much of the problem comes down to the script. After the Hunt is essentially a first-draft screenplay inside a four-star movie, but the craft – Malik Hassan Sayeed’s probing camerawork, Marco Costa’s assertive editing, the usual Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score that serves as a character– can’t overcome shoddy storytelling that expects relevance and social justice buzzwords to substitute for plotting and, ultimately, insight on any of the heady topics it rips from the headlines.

Ironically, the script by Nora Garrett is guilty of the same entitlement it seeks to skewer. It’s loaded with allusions to culture war topics and imagery, using references like campus protests as plot points, but fails to engage with any of them meaningfully.

As per a Guadagnino film, the cast is full of heavy-hitters doing brooding, moody work, but even here, the rush with which After the Hunt seems to have been made can’t help but shine through. In the dual leads, Julia Roberts as Alma and Ayo Edebiri are fine, but mostly repeating beats from earlier work. Roberts infuses her romcom charm with the feckless iciness of her more serious fare like “Closer.” Edebiri does another riff on her “The Bear” role, hemming and hawing awkwardly before bursting into bouts of reluctant, highly competent assertiveness.

Garfield, aged up in a scruffy beard and mid-like crisis sleaze, is having a ball here as he goes from louche one moment to spittle-spewing ass the next, but the best work comes from the supporting players. Stuhlbarg steals nearly every scene he’s in, playing the needy, long-suffering husband with such hoity-toity air that he could be an arch puppet master in a different film. Ditto Chloe Sevigny, whose doctor/confidante is fully realized in a limited role. Both her and Stuhlbarg’s characters feel like they hail from a better movie, one that knows what it is.

And that ultimately is the problem with After the Hunt. It wants to be too many things without committing to any of them. It starts as a thriller, then pivots to something of a character piece with hints of a game of wits before swerving into drama and then ending on an unconvincing, bafflingly wistful note that drives home how noncohesive and scattered the film is. Like “Eddington,” another movie that used cancel culture and wokeness as a thematic setting, After the Hunt acts like it has something to say without ever actually saying anything.

Its attempts at social commentary are used to conceal a barely-there plot that pivots on clunky exposition. The withholding of plotting only makes the reveals that are offered feel more forced. It’s a film that keeps insisting it has something to say while tossing random allusions and references to hot-button issues at the screen in desperate attempts to be provocative. It wants credit for speaking to the moment while offering no actual ideas or stance.

As a film, it’s as arrogant, entitled, and empty as the discourse it seeks to comment on. After the Hunt might be, as its publicity tour framed it, a conversation-starter, but not for the right reasons. It’s a reminder that movies can’t be important unless they’re, first and foremost, good.