Title – After the Hunt (2025)

Director – Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name)

Cast – Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri, Michael Stuhlbarg

Plot – College professor Alma (Roberts) finds new and past wounds opening up when one of her students, Maggie (Edebiri) accuses one of her beloved colleagues and fellow professor Hank (Garfield) of misconduct.

“Don’t you have some publicly obscure protest to be angry at?”

Review by Eddie on 02/03/2026

Judging a book by its cover, there’s no reason why anyone wouldn’t have thought that Luca Guadagnino’s latest feature film effort wasn’t going to be a major title contender.

Featuring a star-studded cast full of critical darlings such as Julia Roberts and Michael Stuhlbarg, fan favourites like Andrew Garfield and rising star Ayo Edebiri, After the Hunt appeared set to be a mature audience hit on the 2025 release calendar as well as a major awards player but after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the hopes of Guadagnino’s newest offering were dashed in record time.

Garnering reviews that weren’t even close to being mixed and marching on its way to less than $10 million dollars in box office receipts worldwide against a production budget reported to be in the vicinity of $70-$80 million, Hunt is a disappointment in more ways than one and easily one of the bigger misses of Guadagnino’s unpredictable and varied career to date.

With all actors involved delivering solid performances, with Roberts and Garfield in particular standing out, it’s hard to know what element to pinpoint for Hunt’s disappointing final result but it’s clear that Guadagnino’s close to two and half hour psychological drama struggles to create characters that are endearing or worthy of much of our affections while Nora Garrett’s at times preachy and over-confident script makes it unclear what the overall message of proceedings are, muddling the reason for Hunt to exist outside of chasing awards glory.

So much of what transpires in Hunt has been done before in similar dramatic or thrilling offerings and without concrete resolutions or murky character motivations/traits you can’t help but see Hunt as a rather underdeveloped and haphazard product that lacked the heart and soul to find its reasoning to be, disallowing audiences to connect with it on a level that may’ve allowed Guadagnino’s film to find its audience like his past works such as Call Me by Your Name or Challengers did.

With a lack of characters we connect with and a story that at times feels pointless and aimless, there was little that was going to save Hunt from its overarching sense of mediocrity and with Guadagnino unable to bring the visual style or directing energy his instilled in his best works, Hunt is a film you feel is destined to be quickly forgotten about, a strange outcome for a film that appeared destined to do great things initially.

Final Say –

A one-time early awards contender that had many excited for its release, After the Hunt proves that all the talent in the world doesn’t automatically make for a good film, as director Luca Guadagnino and his star-studded cast are unable to do much to save this lacklustre feature from itself.

2 nameplate removals out of 5