Films dealing with some kind of sexual assault or rape are nothing new in Hollywood. Wind River, The Last Duel, Revenge, and Promising Young Woman are just a few that have come out in recent years. “She Said” she is a film that deals with this subject matter on a much larger scale. It was about the #metoo movement as a whole. After the Hunt is the latest movie to deal with this subject matter. It’s from director Luca Guadinino. He’s been pretty prolific lately, as this is his third film to be released in a little over a calendar year. This might be his most personal film to date, though, because of its subject matter.

Alma (Julia Roberts) is a philosophy professor at Yale University in the late 2010s. She is married to Fredrik (Michael Stuhlbarg), who is a psychologist. They have a party at their home as they often do, inviting some of her colleagues like Henrik “Hank” Gibson as he’s often called (Andrew Garfield) and her students. Among them is one who is quite enamored by her, Maggie Price (Ayo Ediberi). After everybody has waxed poetic about various topics, they start to head to the exits. Hank offers to walk Maggie home from the party back to her apartment. What happens next is anybody’s guess because both Hank and Maggie have different stories that they confess to their friend and colleague Alma. She has to determine who’s right and who’s wrong in this difficult situation, and it’s not easy.

Julia Roberts has been taking a bit of a sabbatical lately from acting. She did do the Starz series  Gaslit,  but that’s it. This is the first film she’s done in a while since Leave the World Behind and Ticket to Paradise working opposite her friend George Clooney once again. I can see why she chose this project. It is directed by Luca Guadagnin,  who has  been doing great work in recent years and has a stellar supporting cast. The subject matter of the story is important as well. She plays a key role in this film. She’s caught in the middle between two opposing sides of a he said she said. Other than that, the dialogue is very strong from all the actors. It makes sense she’d want to be in this film. She eats up the dialogue and does what she does best, and that’s being demanding and important on screen. You can’t help but listen to every word she’s saying. That’s the mark of a great actress. She’s definitely that.

Andrew Garfield is an actor who’s played everything between Peter Parker/Spider Man to a paraplegic trying to recover from a marathon bombing. He’s great in Tick Tick Boom, a musical, and he controls the screen in Under the Banner of Heaven, a Hulu series about the wives of Mormons. And the secrets that exist in this religion. His recent work in The Eyes of Tammy Faye and We Live In Time have shown me he’s settling for more character work than leading man work so he can get more interesting roles to work on. He does that here with this man who has been accused of a crime. He has to try and do everything to survive. The inciting  incident is very ambiguous , but as the film progresses, the viewers find out more and more about this man and his sexual proclivities. He’s not who we perceive him to be at the beginning of the movie. That was probably the draw for Garfield to play this morally corrupt character. I’m glad he’s changing up his film roles to do different characters. It would be boring if he did the same type of role all the time.

Ayo Ediberi, Camera on the acting scene with a bang in with the Bear as a smart young woman trying to be a big-time chef in Chicago in The Bear. Since then, she has been in comedies and animated films as well as indie films. She is a multitalented actress who writes, directs, and produces her own projects as well as the successful show she won an Emmy for, The Bear. I can see her as this is all a college student who thinks she has all her bases covered. She’s earned that type of respect from what she’s done in her early young career thus far. I don’t buy her character in this film one bit, though. I understand why Guadagnino cast her in the role, but she’s very much overmatched by Roberts, who’s a seasoned veteran of the big and small screen. This shtick she became famous for has worn thin for me. I loved it at first on the Bear, but not anymore. It’s starting to be as tired as she looked playing this character. In fact, I was worn out listening to her in this role. Hopefully, she gets to do something fun and funny once again. That’s what she’s best at.

The camera work in the movie is a bit all over the place. Guadagnino tried to do a lot with close ups, shallow depth of field, and other methods to make this film more flashy and interesting than it was. During certain conversations, he’d fade in and out on people who were speaking while the other person would still be on screen, but you couldn’t see them . He wanted to try to give viewers a strange perspective on the filmmaking,  but all it did was show him being desperate in his filmmaking style instead. This was like a first year film student getting a fancy camera and trying to do a bunch of crazy fade ins and out and so forth. This may have worked better if the story didn’t seem so pedestrian. Something I’ve seen a handful of times before. I love good camera work, just not here.

The sound design was another aspect of the film that seemed desperate by Reznor and Rosd. A ticking clock as a reference to the ticking time bomb that is going on with these characters was annoying. Other odd clicks and clicks throughout the film seemed a bit out of place and desperate. These guys are better than this. They’ve done much better work in Challengers, another Guadagnino film. The length of the movie added to my annoyance with the sound design and score.Throw in some jazz music, and the music/score as a whole was all over the place. 

Nora Garrett wrote the script for this movie, and I applaud her for her efforts. The setting of the film at an Ivy League University didn’t do her any favors. It just gave off a vibe of holier than thou from every character in the film. These people thought they were better than everybody else. Even when they were saying and doing bad things, they believed they were right because of their standing in the school or society. Even the one Black girl came across as better than everybody else around her. She lies and plagiarizes but justifies it because of her race and sexual preferences. I was pretty disgusted by all these people. The script doesn’t do them any favors at all. It just disguised these morally bankrupt people with intelligence and woke speak. It doesn’t say anything new about the #metoo movement or why men do or don’t get away with sexual misconduct. This film completely missed the mark.

After the Hunt is a film that wants to be important in all the right ways but an overwritten script, crazy camera work and walking sound choices combine with performances that are trying too hard to be relevant and important. This movie is trying way too hard to be relevant in a time when things have passed it by. Having it set five years ago was just an excuse to make it important, but instead, it’s overcooked in many ways. Guadagnino even misuses Michael Stuhlbarg, who definitely deserved better than this. I don’t want to underbelly the importance of this subject matter, but it has been done better in other films. The length of the film dragged it down. A tighter runtime may have disguised the things that got on my nerves, but instead, the longer the movie went, the more problems I was finding with it. This is a miss for Guadagnino this time, but I’m sure he’ll bounce back with something better in the future.

2 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen