“After the Hunt” Review
A second plane has hit Higher Education LLC, and that movie is Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt.” I am here to defy that prediction: while “One Battle After Another” warms a culture devoid of important cinema, “After the Hunt” is where the magnifying glass must be directed.
When Joan Didion said, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she was talking about “After the Hunt.” Ayo Edebiri plays Maggie Price: living in an apartment far cheaper than what she could actually afford, dating a nonbinary person for that sole fact alone, prancing around Yale University in clothes that scream, not whisper, wealth. You have a character with an axe to grind; yet she has no idea where to throw it. So what does she do? Wield those axes like she’s playing darts while drunk, hiding behind op-eds, impervious to whose character she assassinates. Guadagnino has stripped naked his usual gimmickry: the pornographic gaze of “Call Me by Your Name,” the blood and guts of “Bones and All.” What remains is gelid and relentless. Maggie snoops through Julia Roberts’ medicine cabinet at a dinner party, and Guadagnino films it with the weight of Chekhov’s gun: she’s gathering ammunition. This is the inability to differentiate between intimacy and the gathering of schadenfreude artillery. Every confidence shared becomes raw material. She’s on the hunt, and everyone around her are prey mistaking “girlbossery” for a wounded Bambi.
The line that exposes Maggie’s entire project comes midway through the film. She asks: “am I not owed this?” It’s supposed to sound like a question, but it’s not. It’s a mission statement. “Owed.” The transactional, indebted language requiring care and compensation. Maggie has decided that the world “owes” her something. Not justice (she hasn’t been wronged), not “truth” (her character is a fallacy-feminist), but attention and validation. This is the cultural capital existing within 2025, where ‘V’ doesn’t only stand for ‘Vendetta’ but for ‘Victim’ with a capital V. Where trauma is the only currency that matters, where the endgame is monetizing academic, sexual and mental suffering before someone else GoFundMe’s their own. She’s not just a CliffsNotes scholar: she’s a CliffsNotes human being. Roberts’ husband (the psychologist who is paid to see through everyone’s subterfuge) questions her about virtue ethics. She can’t defend her intellect because her intellect doesn’t exist: it is strictly strategic. This is selective neuroticism: she’s too nervous to watch paint dry but becomes ascetic when watching the clock tick. The husband knows it. The men in this movie know it. Because the men are the only ones not performing, the heroes, and they’re the most radioactive thing about this movie.
Chloe Sevigny delivers the film’s most lacerating indictment: “What happened to stuffing everything down and developing a crippling dependency habit in your thirties?” Maggie represents the new model: weaponize everything, perform your pain, demand the world rebuild itself around your specifications or be condemned as complicit. In 2025, neutrality is violence. Being on the “wrong side”—or not performing your allegiance loudly enough—is the cardinal sin.
Roberts later snaps in the classroom: “What could make you happy? Should we build society to your specifications? Padlock it with fucking trigger warnings? That is not what I’m here for. I’m here to fucking teach.” She shoots Chekhov’s gun: “You are the worst kind of mediocre student. With so much availability but no talent or desire to do so.” She’s talking to Edebiri, but she’s talking to an entire generation coddled into believing their feelings are synonymous with truth, that their identities are immune to criticism, that their trauma is a shield against accountability. Maggie’s disciples, bleached-mullet, sweater vest-wearing alpacas, attack Roberts with ideologies and iPhones. The next scene shows her in a hospital bed, rupturing from the stress of ideological warfare. This is what the movie hunts after: the adversary that activism can be. It becomes physical violence. It hospitalizes people: killing them slowly, then quickly, then slowly again.
When the allegations lose steam, Maggie shifts tactics. “I am another black woman who was failed by a white woman,” she says. Identity is not a fixed category: it’s a closet full of weapons and skeletons. Maggie doesn’t experience oppression, she deploys it. She’s a chameleon of “causes,” shapeshifting between “survivor” and “black woman failed by feminism” depending on which will do the most damage. And it works. It’s 2025: the social game is rigged in favor of whoever can claim the most intersectional victimhood.
The film reveals Roberts’ own fabricated teenage allegation—which resulted in a man’s suicide, but it’s not a tawdry twist: it’s a mirror. Guadagnino is showing us that the cycle of fabricated allegations, of weaponized victimhood: none of this is new, it’s generational. It’s economical. Roberts did it decades ago, Edebiri does it now, and someone will do it tomorrow because there’s an incentive and a structural reward. The difference is that Roberts carries guilt, Edebiri feels nothing.
Roberts meets her for drinks, now the dean. Edebiri is “thriving.” “You’re not really happy,” Edebiri says. “And that article? Cynical as fuck.” She adds, “it doesn’t matter to me anymore.” It never mattered to her. She extracted what she needed and moved on. She’s a locust: consuming everything in her path and flying to the next field. Roberts pays and the camera lingers on the $20 bill; it buys our drinks, and sometimes, our silence. “After the Hunt” will, and has already, bombed. When it does get discussed, it will be called “conservative,” “reactionary,” “insensitive,” all terms we use now to avoid engaging with anything that complicates our predisposed narratives. When Joan Didion said, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she didn’t mean fallacy. She meant the anomalous film like this one: clarity, cruelty and the bodies left behind.