In theory, After the Hunt, director Luca Guadagnino’s would-be psychological thriller tracing the fallout of a sexual-assault accusation at a cosseted Ivy League campus, hinges on a single early scene: Alma, the aloof and alluring philosophy professor made icily incandescent by Julia Roberts, arrives home to find Maggie, her doctoral student protege played by ascendant star Ayo Edebiri, waiting for her in the rain.
Crouched together in an apartment stairwell – Guadagnino, a slick and stylish film-maker, frames them facing each other as mirrored negatives in preppy neutrals, a generational yin-yang – Maggie tells Alma in clipped, digressive bits that something bad happened with Hank (Andrew Garfield), a fellow tenure-track professor who serves as Alma’s professional rival, friend and maybe lover. The two had left Alma’s the night before following an evening of drinking and tossing around airless provocations about how offending someone became “the pre-eminent cardinal sin”, or how “the common enemy has been chosen and it’s the straight, white, cis male”. After a nightcap at her apartment, Maggie says, Hank “crossed the line”.
