After the Hunt

After the Hunt is Luca Guadagnino's most uneven work and, ironically, his most generic. A director known for breaking the mold ends up stuck with a film that follows manuals and formulas. Nora Garrett tries to write a script full of provocations and moral ambiguities, but what emerges is a pretentious and exhausting text. The trio of protagonists try hard, but cannot escape the limitations imposed by the material itself. It is a drama that strives for depth, but gets lost in its own vanity. A film about guilt that seems to feel no guilt for being so empty.

To get through this movie, but I did.

You keep waiting for the pace to pick up and bring the story forward, but it never happens.

You keep wishing is there something behind door number 2,3 and 4. There is not The acting is superb. Julia Roberts is very good.

If you have absolutely nothing else to watch, turn off the tv and do something else.

I was drawn to After The Hunt because of Luca Guadagnino and the stellar cast, but once the first Woody Allen-esque scene is done, the film takes an extremely slow and uninteresting pace that makes the dialogue and characters somewhat infuriating to understand or even care about throughout the film. If it had been a faster pace, tighter script, and focused on the core story, it could've been an enjoyable watch. The acting is still really solid and the shots are beautiful with a score that is tantalizing, as always in Luca's films.

Guadagnino is holding a kind of mirror up to our society, hysterically busy with political and moral correctness, and its reflection shows a deeply distorting image. The feeling that something is wrong right from the start finds it's perfect expression in Alma's heavy pain attacks, well played by Julia Roberts. And yes, it's not supposed to make us feel more comfortable than her. There's no one to route for, not a single character showing integrity, ( maybe with the exception of Michael Stuhlbarg as Alma's husband), a lot of moral hypocrisy, cynicism, egocentric, manipulative behaviour all over the place, and we, the audience, is being left disoriented, not knowing if the scandal everyone is so obsessed with has really happened or not. It's not shown to us, which I think is a genius trick.

You are forced to make up your own mind, exhausting for some of course.

Guadagnino refuses to give simple answers to the complicated experimental setup he is questioning here from different angles. In addition to that you'll even find a dark comedy about unfulfilled desires underneath.

The result seems to upset many people, i on the contrary was grateful to find a lot of inspiring and controversial topics to think about in the screenplay and Guadagnino's efficient direction.

"After the hunt" could have been excellent. Acting was incredible, and the story was interesting. However, the entire film was distracted by a very obnoxious score. And random cinematography. Overall, the film was well done however these shortcomings distracted so much that it took away from the entire movie. Julia Roberts was phenomenal, as was Andrew Garfield.