On October 11, 2025, the world premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, After the Hunt, unfolded at the Venice Film Festival—an event as tempestuous as the film’s subject matter. Attendees, including 1,500 members of the press and film industry, braved a torrential downpour before settling into an air-conditioned theater to watch the much-anticipated, and immediately divisive, MeToo-themed drama. The movie, starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, and Andrew Garfield, has since sparked heated debates and introspection, both among critics and audiences, about truth, power, and the murky gray zones of morality.
Set in the hallowed halls of Yale University, After the Hunt centers on Alma (Roberts), a formidable philosophy professor, as she is drawn into the aftermath of a sexual assault accusation leveled by Maggie (Edebiri), a student, against another professor, Hank (Garfield). The film, described by its director as a "moral thriller," resists easy answers and refuses the audience the comfort of clear-cut heroes or villains. Instead, it invites viewers into a labyrinth of shifting loyalties, subjective truths, and power plays, where every character’s motives and morality are left open to interpretation.
According to The Nightly, Guadagnino’s intent was never to offer a tidy resolution. “After the Hunt is a movie about the dimensions of what happens when someone wants to speak a truth that is subjective, and the other is willing or not willing to listen to the truth, or actually wants to impose their own truth,” he explained. The Italian filmmaker, celebrated for works like Call Me By Your Name and Challengers, instead crafted a film that, as he puts it, “tries to let the audience make up their mind from what they’ve experienced, and at the same time, invite the audience to have a conversation about it.”
Those conversations have been anything but simple. Early reviews from Venice were mixed, with many critics and viewers puzzled by the film’s refusal to take a clear stance on the MeToo controversy at its core. The story’s ambiguity—who is telling the truth, and what does justice look like in such a rarefied, privileged world—has made After the Hunt a kind of cinematic Rorschach test. As Ayo Edebiri told The Nightly, “I’ve been thinking about how in a lot of [Guadagnino’s] other films, the characters are unafraid of desire, but in this film, everybody is quite locked up by it. It’s like a pressure cooker. You put too much pressure on something and it’s going to come out sideways, jagged and all wrong.”
Edebiri, who plays Maggie, described the film in a recent interview as “a Rorschach Test that interrogates your discomfort.” She elaborated, “You can watch the movie one way and get what you want out of it, or you can realize something is being subverted, both in the film and in yourself. It’s this really cool, tricky, layered Rorschach Test that Luca put together, and it’s very intentional.” The film’s layered narrative, she said, forces viewers to confront not only the characters’ choices, but also their own biases and discomforts.
Andrew Garfield, who portrays the accused professor Hank, echoed this sentiment, emphasizing that the film deliberately avoids casting anyone as a pure victim, villain, or hero. “What Luca is so great at doing, and what the script is so wonderful at doing, is it doesn’t cast anyone as victim, villain or hero,” he said. “It’s holding up a mirror to every audience member to reckon with themselves and their own relationship to their own villainy, their heroism and their own victimhood. It’s all of those indescribable areas in between that don’t adhere to any of those binaries.” Garfield admitted that the film’s divisive nature even prompted him to examine his own reactions: “I’m not saying that Hank isn’t the villain, just for the record.”
The complexity of the characters is perhaps most striking in Julia Roberts’ portrayal of Alma. Known for her warmth and charm in classics like Pretty Woman and Erin Brockovich, Roberts takes a sharp turn here, playing a character who is, by her own admission, cold and enigmatic. “I don’t have someone like that in my life,” Roberts confessed. “It was a fascinating study of a person. Coldness is not something that comes naturally to me in any way, almost to a fault. So, exploring the idea of someone behaving like that and why people behave like that, and where does it really come from, and what is the point of it? Because, to me, it cuts you off from so much value in life.”
Despite Alma’s emotional distance, Roberts knew she had to infuse the character with enough charisma to explain why everyone around her is so desperate for her approval. But as Garfield pointed out, there are no true winners in After the Hunt, regardless of the characters’ privilege or status. “The idea of winning in this current culture, the world that we inhabit right now, the very capitalistic world that we’re in right now, winning is not winning,” Garfield remarked. “However many billions of dollars (you may have), on a yacht, whatever, spiritually, you are nowhere near victory. On a soul level, there’s no winning there.”
For Edebiri, the film’s greatest achievement may be its ability to provoke conversation—even if those discussions are uncomfortable or contentious. “We need to have conversations, no matter how painful or boring or annoying or repetitive they might seem, we have to get in the mud together, and I think it’s going to suck. The whole point is that it has to suck. If we want real, rooted, heart-to-heart, eye-to-eye communication, it can be done.” She reflected on her own upbringing in a “really, really religious and very socially conservative” environment, noting that change is possible when people are willing to engage in honest, sometimes difficult, dialogue. “I was really afraid my whole life, I did some work, but also my parents did, and I was really impressed and moved by them. I was like, ‘You’re human beings and you’ve been doing this a bit longer than me, and you’re also capable of change’.”
Guadagnino, for his part, has never been one to shy away from controversy. He picked up Nora Garrett’s script for After the Hunt on a flight to Los Angeles and was so taken with it that he arranged to meet Roberts before even landing. “It was the most exciting date I had in my life,” he recalled. “It was kinship at first sight.” Roberts agreed, describing their meeting as “life affirming. Really. Truly.”
In the end, After the Hunt is less about providing answers than about sparking debate. As Edebiri put it, “Will the film be able to spark those conversations? I don’t know. We did what we did and I hope that the art sticks. If people are having conversations, that’s a good thing.” With its official cinema release on October 16, 2025, the film seems poised to do just that, inviting audiences to wrestle with ambiguity and, perhaps, to see themselves reflected in its unsettling mirror.
