After the Hunt 2025 Movie Review
I don’t think most Guadagnino fans are going to like this, even though Luca’s auteur style is definitely present, and in full force. No one will critique the stellar direction, the impeccable cinematography, or the top notch acting. What people can and I imagine will take issue with is the plot, which can be accurately described as intentionally and unapologetically ugly.
The reason it will fail to resonate with people is primarily because of how detached and cynical its presentation of American political discourse is. In it, MeToo, BLM, and even transgenderism are portrayed as tools that a self-serving academic and medial class use for nefarious means. Are the tools themselves critiqued? They are not, and this adds to a pervasively discomforting tension.
That said, people searching for affirmation of the aforementioned movements and ideals will not find them either. Guadagnino outright refuses to appease audience sensibilities- ANY audience- with surgical precision. He does not condemn or condone grand ideas and their factions, but small characters and their motivations.
Nonetheless, this is not exactly a subtle film. On paper, the plot deals with touchy subjects by offering a scathing diatribe and cinematic slap in the face- but this is seemingly only a way to jolt us awake. This movie is not like Eddington, where the slap IS the point, and a mass, impulsive descent into madness is just that. Guadagnino deals with a much more deliberate madness: While both films concern those who are driven to evil by a lack of control (Hank embodies this in multiple ways), After the Hunt is also and more effectively about those who are drawn to evil by a desire for control. Maggie’s slap serves as a nuanced probing of those who knowingly and premeditatedly do wrong, while hypocritically lecturing others on their (questionable, much less significant) rightness.
Alma, the protagonist, is another example of hypocrisy. Throughout this film, we see her trying to solve everyone’s problems: to help, it seems, those whom she cares about. But, she does so while ignoring and mistreating the one person who genuinely cares about her, who is so clearly vying for her attention it becomes comedic. Moreover, she allows herself to be involved in the business of others while ignoring much larger, much more serious issues that are clearly destroying her from the inside: one, a physical ailment, and the other, a terrible guilt.
The epilogue says a lot. After the hunt, after all the pain and harm they’ve caused each other and themselves, these people have learned nothing. They are back to their old games, their old egotistical ways, connected but fully detached, informed but completely disengaged. As the world burns around them, they continue living their cold, comfortable lives.
The final shot spells it out: the characters have been and still are driven primarily and perhaps only by hedonistic pursuits of money and pleasure, with reputation- no matter how unreflective of the true self- being the mechanism by which these things are attained. The whole film revolves around this premise, and I think it does so successfully. That mode of being- the ugliness thereof- is captured with captivating beauty and relentless honesty.
Do these people represent the ideas they opportunistically espouse, or the institutions they shamelessly corrupt? Is it the case that our intellectual hegemonies and journalistic institutions are rotted, that the people who make them up are self-righteous narcissists whose internal lives are repulsive to the core? Guadagnino refuses to give us a direct answer to these questions, and he doesn’t care if that silence makes us uncomfortable.
His film is not a lukewarm bath into which we might sink, fall asleep, and drown. It is instead a water-boarding session, incredibly hard to endure let alone find any positivity in.
