After the Hunt

Release date: 17 October 2025 (UK)

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cinematography: Malik Hassan Sayeed

Producers: Luca Guadagnino, Brian Grazer, Jeb Brody, Allan Mandelbaum

Screenplay: Nora Garrett

Starring: Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri, Michael Stuhlbarg

Running time: 2h 19m

It’s the new Julia Roberts!

I will say from the start, it is a struggle to write coherently about this one, because in the middle of it the baby produced what I can only describe as an Event Poo.

You know those videos of very very viscous lava edging slowly towards an unsuspecting village?

Anyway.

google ‘slow moving lava’ for a sense of the vibe

I really enjoyed this film, and I think it’s because it’s absolutely dripping with Thoughts and Ideas. I’ve read some reviews since which suggest those Thoughts and Ideas are too many and too muddled, and perhaps that’s fair, but I think there’s something about the post baby brain that finds this less irritating than I otherwise might?

When you spend so much time focusing on very immediate issues such as ‘give the baby food’, ‘get the baby to sleep’ or ‘oh no this poo just keeps on coming’ (I can’t stop thinking about it), it’s quite nice to spend a couple of hours being bombarded with Very Big Topics.

Set at Yale University, this is a sort of encyclopaedia of the angst that universities - particularly in America - are going through at the moment. Sexual violence, the Me Too movement, blurry teacher student relationships, censorship, consent - it’s all there, and all delivered with some fairly clunky signposting - things like Julia Roberts’s philosophy lecturer watching videos of the LA wildfires while a commentator says ‘the fires just keep on spreading’ and ‘embers are falling like snowflakes’ (get it? SNOWFLAKES).

she’s a lecturer in ethics, because everything must meaningfully serve the themes

JR plays an extremely cool academic who wears very crisp white suits (the white costuming is one of the clunky signposts) and just generally looks fantastic. (Side note - some may cynically comment that this is unrealistic, but I had a philosophy lecturer once who was aspirationally stunning, to the point where I think we all briefly considered careers in metaphysics just to try and be more like her.)

She’s on track for tenure, but so is her younger male colleague Andrew Garfield, with whom she has the kind of ambiguous, awkwardly close relationship that leads them to go for after work drinks while her therapist husband - a man you will feel very sorry for and then hate quite a lot and then feel sorry for again - is making a cassoulet.

They’re just good friends

It’s a campus film, so there are blurred lines, uncomfortable closeness between colleagues, uncertain power dynamics and, inevitably, a sexual assault accusation against Andrew Garfield’s ‘Hank.’ I have to say, while I absolutely believed in Julia Robert’s character, I struggled with the concept of Andrew Garfield as a philosophy lecturer called Hank.

Everything about Hank other than the philosophy part, though, is completely on point - he’s that guy in denim who doesn’t think society should be so constrained, who just wants everyone to relax and stop worrying about taking offence so much, and who absolutely is just walking you home after a boozy party because he’s a really nice guy.

I really hated Hank.

If they wanted me to be uncertain about whether Hank did it, they needed to make Hank less obviously awful.

To be clear, Hank definitely did it.

That’s Frederik, in the background. SYMBOLISM

There isn’t really anyone likeable in the film - with the possible exception of the therapist husband, Frederik, who quite wonderfully complains to JR that there’s no space for him to be childish in their relationship, and then exhibits some of the most outlandishly childish behaviour a grown human has ever displayed. And he’s a THERAPIST. He helps people with their THOUGHTS! I genuinely don’t know what we’re meant to think of him, and I quite like that in a film. People aren’t black and white, you know? (Again, we are constantly reminded of this theme with various character’s costuming choices and, quite weirdly, a lot of close ups of the womens’ fingernails?)

I think I’m talking myself out of this film as I write this, and I don’t want to because I did have a really good time. Yes, we all came out of it slightly confused about what on earth happened, but we also had the sort of conversations I imagine we were supposed to have about generational divides, the extraordinary simultaneous power and powerlessness that comes with youth, how to safeguard but not over sanitise - and of course (speaking of over sanitising) Lily’s absolutely outrageous poo.

Because we can think about the highfalutin and the extraordinary ordinary at the same time. And I will force my brain to manage both, even if it leaves me standing in a cinema toilet on a tuesday morning, laughing hysterically at the poo that just. keeps. coming and holding up two spare nappies like catching mitts.

It’s all about balance.

Good things: I loved this for Julia Roberts, what a great, meaty role. She’s great. The mad therapist - how wonderful to concede that therapists, too, can be mad! I want a spinoff where we get to see him at work.

Bad things: Oh it’s smug though. I’m always suspicious of a film that features the director’s name as a possessive - it’s not ‘After the Hunt’ it’s ‘Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt.’ Come on, dude. Speaking of which, what on earth does the title mean? Bothers me.

My review: A good time had by all. In between nappy changes.

Lily’s review: I mean, technically this was one poo, but it was an Event Poo so I feel like it deserves 3-4?

Next week: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Ugh, struggling to be enthusiastic about this one, which happens to fall on my birthday. Maybe I’ll bring some candles along.