🎭 After the Hunt (2025) — Julia Roberts & Andrew Garfield Shine in Luca Guadagnino’s Chilling Campus Thriller | Movie Review, Cast, Plot

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Writer: Nora Garrett

Cast: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny

Genre: Psychological Thriller / Drama

Release Date: October 10, 2025

Distributed by: Amazon MGM Studios

Luca Guadagnino, the master of tension and sensual storytelling (Call Me by Your Name, Challengers), returns with a haunting and cerebral thriller — After the Hunt (2025). This time, he swaps romantic longing for moral chaos, diving deep into academia’s power struggles, blurred ethics, and the fragility of truth.

At its core stands Julia Roberts as Alma Imhoff — a brilliant Yale philosophy professor forced to navigate an accusation that threatens to destroy everything she’s built. What begins as an academic scandal quickly spirals into a psychological labyrinth, testing loyalties, memory, and morality.

It’s not a story about good versus evil — it’s about the uncomfortable gray in between.

🌀 The Plot: When Truth Becomes a Weapon

Set in the polished, cerebral halls of Yale University, After the Hunt begins with a dinner party that seems ordinary — until one conversation triggers a chain of events that expose buried secrets and unhealed wounds.

When Alma’s protégé, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), accuses their colleague and Alma’s close friend Hank (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault, Alma finds herself caught in the crossfire between justice, loyalty, and self-preservation.

Her every choice ripples outward — from whispering to the dean to confronting her own murky past. As the scandal deepens, Alma’s own truth resurfaces — a long-buried trauma, a past lie, and a secret that threatens to collapse her moral world.

In one of the film’s most searing exchanges, Maggie asks, “Did you ever believe me?” to which Alma quietly replies, “I believed what I could live with.”That single line defines the movie — truth, not as fact, but as survival.

🎭 Performances: Julia Roberts Shines in the Shadows

Julia Roberts delivers a career-best performance — not glamorous, but raw and fractured. Her portrayal of Alma is layered with intellect, guilt, and longing — a woman both brilliant and broken.

Andrew Garfield’s Hank is equally captivating — charming yet volatile, balancing empathy with danger. His scenes with Roberts crackle with unspoken tension.

Ayo Edebiri continues her meteoric rise with a subtle but powerful turn as Maggie, the student whose courage (or manipulation) triggers the film’s chaos.Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny round out the cast with performances that ground the academic intrigue in quiet realism.

Guadagnino’s direction gives every glance and silence a weight of its own. The result? A chamber piece that feels like a duel — part confession, part courtroom.

🧩 Themes: Memory, Power, and the Cost of Belief

After the Hunt explores the blurred boundaries between victim and perpetrator, mentor and manipulator. It’s a study of intellectual arrogance, guilt, and moral decay.

Guadagnino’s camera lingers on cold lecture halls, sterile offices, and storm-lit apartments — spaces where reason fails and emotion takes over.The screenplay by Nora Garrett examines how academia masks human flaws behind rationality.

The haunting question it leaves behind: When truth becomes subjective, what’s left to believe?

🎞️ Direction & Style: Guadagnino’s Cold Fire

The visual language is vintage Guadagnino — elegant, painterly, and slow-burn.Every shot feels like a debate: beauty versus cruelty, honesty versus denial.

The film’s pacing is deliberate, perhaps even punishing, but that’s the point — it drags us into Alma’s exhaustion and confusion. The tension simmers, not explodes.

The sound design — the hum of fluorescent lights, the echo of rain against old windows — mirrors Alma’s unraveling psyche.

💬 Critical Reception

After the Hunt split critics right down the middle. Some hailed it as a provocative character study, while others found it too elusive and over-written.

Julia Roberts, however, received near-universal acclaim — hailed as “superb,” “monumental,” and “one of her best performances in years.”

Andrew Garfield’s layered performance also drew praise for walking the line between sincerity and menace.

While the screenplay has been described as “muddled” and “overlong,” many agree it’s an ambitious exploration of modern moral ambiguity.

In short — it’s a film designed not to please, but to provoke.

🧠 What Makes ‘After the Hunt’ Stand Out

• It challenges the viewer — refusing to hand out easy villains or heroes.

• It showcases Julia Roberts in her most complex role since Erin Brockovich.

• It explores the emotional consequences of truth, lies, and forgiveness in a post-#MeToo academic world.

• And above all, it lingers — like a philosophical riddle that keeps echoing after the credits roll.

🪞 Final Verdict

⭐ Rating: 3.5 / 5

After the Hunt isn’t perfect — it’s slow, talky, and intentionally discomforting — but it’s also fearless and unforgettable.It’s a mirror held up to our times, asking us: How do we judge others when our own truths are imperfect?

Julia Roberts anchors this haunting drama with quiet brilliance, while Luca Guadagnino reminds us that the most dangerous hunts happen not in forests — but in the human mind.

❓ FAQs

Q1: What is After the Hunt (2025) about?

t’s a psychological thriller set in Yale University, following a professor, Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), caught between a student’s sexual assault accusation and her own dark past.

Q2: Who stars in After the Hunt?

The film features Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Chloë Sevigny in key roles.

Q3: Who directed the film?

After the Hunt is directed by Luca Guadagnino, known for Call Me by Your Name and Challengers.

Q4: Is After the Hunt based on a true story?

No, it’s a fictional narrative, but it draws inspiration from real-world conversations around truth, power, and ethics in academia.

Q5: What genre is the movie?

It’s a psychological thriller with elements of mystery and drama.

Q6: How was the audience reaction?

Viewers are divided — some praised its performances and complexity, while others found it overly intellectual. It’s a film meant to spark debate, not deliver comfort.

Q7: Where can I watch After the Hunt?

The film was released theatrically in the U.S. on October 10, 2025, by Amazon MGM Studios and is expected to arrive on streaming platforms later this year.

🎥 Final Words

After the Hunt dares to do what few Hollywood films attempt anymore — it makes you think, argue, and feel conflicted. It’s a film about guilt, memory, and the haunting question of what we owe to the truth — and to ourselves.

As Alma whispers in the film’s closing scene,“We’re all hunters, chasing the versions of ourselves we can still forgive.”