After the Hunt is the latest film by Luca Guadagnino, which premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Faithful readers may recall that I was positively surprised by Queer, which played in the Venice competition last year. There was a degree of surprise among the critics that the new film was presented outside the competition. After the screening ended, most people were surprised that it had been screened in a festival at all. When a film comes with repeated, stern warnings to the press about the embargo and that reviews can under no circumstances be published before the embargo is lifted, you typically know that the festival is aware it has a bad film on its hands.

It Happened at Yale

The peculiarity begins already during the opening credits, which emulates Woody Allen’s. I spoke with other critics who were also perplexed by this.¹ I have been told that the director called this an homage to Woody Allen. Yes, the film is set in an academic environment with a lot of laboured dialogue, but the Allen reference is still weird. I have very little patience with Ingmar Bergman’s Mini-Me, but he has never written a script as poorly written and convoluted as this one. The main setting for this “psychological thriller” is Yale, where Alma Imhoff works as a philosophy professor. She is married to a psychotherapist, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg, who looks like he walked in directly from the Shirley set).

Everything wrong with After the Hunt

One of Alma’s students, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), is an annoying brat with wealthy parents. She seems to admire Alma, but she could be acting. The same can not be said for the person portraying the character. During a party thrown by Alma, Maggie goes to the bathroom and finds a photo of a handsome stranger. Why the photo should be hidden there is not even close to the worst contrivance in the film. After the hunt party, Maggie comes to Alma and claims that her colleague, Hank (Andrew Garfield), did something inappropriate to her, including kissing. It’s all very vague, and Alma is rightly sceptical. I will not get into the plot, which is ludicrous beyond any suspension of disbelief.

The script in question is credited to “Nora Garrett”. I doubt that is the name of an actual person, but rather an acronym for a combination of AI tools that created this mess. The moronic twists and turns made me think of Carl Th Dreyer’s Swedish film Two People (Två Människor 1948), which is universally regarded as a misfire. It appears to be an attempt to satirise the current university scene, which is something worth mocking, considering what has been going on there during the last decade or two. Alas, the level of satire is on Eddington level without any subtlety or sign of intelligence. Julia Roberts’ character appears to be the only one with a brain in the story.

That goes for the actress as well, who elegantly handled pathetically inept PC questions at the press conference. She was as charming and poised as Demi Moore during last year’s equally bizarre event for The Substance at Cannes. It seems that only individuals over fifty have their heads on straight nowadays. Regarding the cinematic qualities, occasionally, After the Hunt resembles a Woody Allen film, but most of the time, it has no discernible look at all. To compensate, the director has brought in a composer with a score that sounds like someone trying to hammer in Nine Inch Nails into a wooden floor. Some critics have compared it to the piano piece by György Ligeti in Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

In case this isn’t abundantly clear for even the most dim-witted critic, Guadagnino includes a visit to the Vienna Central Cemetery, where the composer is buried, to drive the message home even further. That might be a proper treatment of this film. Don’t hide it in a bathroom where it can easily be found, but bury it as deep as possible so it will never be unearthed ever again.