"After the Hunt": Wokism, Fear, and Secrets at University

In 1994, David Mamet directed Oleanna , an adaptation of his play of the same name, which premiered two years earlier. William H. Macy plays a college professor on the verge of becoming a professor and receiving a significant raise, who finds himself accused, first of sexual harassment, and then of rape, by a student (Deborah Eisenstadt) frustrated by his teaching style and dissatisfied with her low grade. At one point, the student informs him that there is "a group" made up of colleagues she consults who advise her on how to confront and accuse him. This group has also drawn up a list of books they want removed from the university, including one written by the professor in question.

Oleanna is a rare work about the "politically correct" ideology that was then beginning to emerge in American society and universities. We find echoes of this David Mamet film in Luca Guadagnino's more complex The Hunt , written by actress Nora Garrett. And after Todd Field's Tar (2022) and Canadian Denys Arcand's Feel Like I'm More (2023), it is yet another title that has the courage to reflect on woke fundamentalism and how it has descended upon American universities, creating a climate of collective fear, persecution, and political, cultural, and freedom of expression censorship, destroying careers and reputations, as well as the ramifications of #MeToo.

[Watch the trailer for “After the Hunt”:]

Julia Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, a respected philosophy professor at Yale University, married to a psychiatrist, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), and on the verge of becoming a professor. Alma is very close to a brilliant and irreverent younger colleague, Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), and greatly admired by one of her best students, Margaret (Ayo Edebiri), a young Black lesbian dating a trans man whose wealthy parents make large donations to the institution. After dinner at the Imhoffs' house, a visibly distraught Margaret confides in Alma that Hank tried to rape her after taking her home, and that she is counting on her testimony if she reports the case.

Alma interrogates Hank about what Margaret told her. He vehemently denies it, revealing to his friend and colleague that her student plagiarized her thesis and knows he knows it, which is why she's accused of rape. Hank is quickly fired without Alma lifting a finger to defend him, and relations between her and Margaret become increasingly strained. Meanwhile, on the night of the dinner, the young woman discovered personal documents hidden in the teacher's home, relating to a traumatic secret from her youth that Alma hadn't even revealed to her husband and that haunts her to this day, and stole one of them.

[See an interview with the director:]

Guadagnino begins by depicting the atmosphere of privilege and comfort, arrogance and intellectual snobbery, and the sense of untouchability that reigns among the faculty, leading them to develop a close, even somewhat intimate, relationship with their favorite students, as seen in the opening dinner sequence. He then goes on to describe, in a meticulous and dense visual and dramatic approach, the unraveling of this institutional, human, and professional and intimate microcosm. He leaves room for areas of shadow and ambiguity, and even a major surprise near the end, which counters the demonizing stereotypes of #MeToo.

As Nora Garrett's tightly woven plot unfolds, we see how the university administration escapes major problems and evils by summarily sacrificing the professors. And how Alma gradually loses patience with the way the spoiled and complexed Margaret plays the racial and sexual victimization cards, with the protests of her boyfriend and friends ("Don't you have some reason to protest?" she snaps at them when surrounded by them in a courtyard), and with the intrusion of the woke vulgar in the philosophical discussion (see the sequence in which she becomes enraged and destroys the students' arguments during a class). As Alma says to Margaret at one point: "Not everything is supposed to exist for us to feel comfortable."

[See an interview with Julia Roberts:]

There's also a significant moment, when the faculty attend a lecture by an Arab author and colleague about his new book, which posits that jihadism and feminism are compatible, without provoking shock, outrage, or opposition. It's a satirical touch, and the film would have benefited from a few more, to alleviate the suffocating atmosphere it immerses itself in. The conclusion of After the Hunt, which arrives several years after the events narrated , is anticlimactic, lacking the comfort of a just or "redemptive" resolution.

The film's most vulnerable link is Julia Roberts, whose glamour and "star" status (and the memory of some iconic roles) make us reluctant to believe without hesitation that she can play a philosophy professor at an Ivy League university who quotes Foucault and Kirkegaard . Although the dramatic depth of the story, and the presence around Roberts of Garfield, Edibiri, Chloë Sevigny (the latter as the psychologist who doesn't accept "non-binary" bathrooms and is surprised to hear Morrissey in a student bar...) and, above all, Michael Stuhlbarg as Alma's patient and understanding husband, who puts up with her introspection and understands from afar who Margaret is and what she's capable of, contribute to lessening this impression of implausibility in the casting .

[Watch a sequence from the film:]

Of course, for those who have closely followed the abuses and arbitrary acts perpetrated by far-left woke students at American universities, the impunity they have enjoyed, and the cowardly complicity revealed, even if only through silence and omission, by their management, " After the Hunt" falls far, far short of reality. Even so, and despite the restraint and some pandering, one cannot deny the fearlessness of Luca Guadagnino and Nora Garrett (and note the hostility of much of the film's reviews aggregated on the website Rotten Tomatoes). And it's not just a cinephile tribute that the opening credits and credits for " After the Hunt" use the same font as Woody Allen's films...