‘After the Hunt’ and maintaining the status quo for one’s own survival

Editing one feature film after another since 2017, when he gained prominence with Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino looks at the actress’s debut script Nora Garrett and delivers a thriller up to their most recent releases, Rivals and Queerboth from 2024, in After the Huntwhich is now showing in Brazilian cinemas.

In the novelty, a university professor finds herself involved in an ethical and professional crisis when her best friend accuses another professor, a longtime friend, of sexual assault. While conflicts in campus Intensify, following the release of the news and the beginning of an investigation, the teacher’s secrets threaten to come to light, testing her limits between loyalty, justice and conviction.

After the Hunt presents a generational conflict based on an issue that crosses generations, becoming increasingly complicated as the years go by. There are no easy answers to a sexual assault case and the Guadagnino works precisely on this, updating the discussion with new possibilities: the situation is the same — abuse made possible by a hierarchy of power — but the characters are different.

On the one hand, there is the victim, a young black and lesbian woman, but born into a rich and privileged family, who still did not have the talent or ability to be extraordinary in her academic life, as would be expected. On the other, a white, heterosexual man, a super predator in the social chain, but who fought to achieve the professional prominence for which he is recognized. Both tell their stories — and both may be telling the truth.

Without a single version to be considered, the issue ends up falling on Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts, The World After Us), the university professor who finds herself in the middle of the conflict between the victim, her best student Maggie Price (Ayo Edebiri, The Bear), and the attacker, one of his closest friends, the assistant professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield, All the Time We Have).

Progressive when it comes to defending your own rights in a world dominated by men, just like your colleague, Soul appears quite conservative when the accusation arises. Faithfully tied to her routine, the teacher focuses on maintaining the status quo — after all, how to be correct in an incorrect world? — for seeming to fear that his perfectly constructed life will fall apart.

In the end, without trivializing a delicate and extremely important issue, After the Hunt refrains from giving a verdict on the main conflict, leaving clues in the air that, after all, one swallow doesn’t make a summer; and focuses its solution on Soul and what led her to take the actions she did in the case. The revelation not only shocks but also adds a new dramatic perspective to the story, further increasing doubts and reaffirming that the issue may always be more delicate and harmful than we can imagine.

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• Andrew Garfield

• Ayo Edebiri

• After the Hunt

• julia roberts

• Luca Guadagnino