HKIFF: After the Hunt 誣網之後 (2025) - USA / Italy
Reviewed at the 50th Hong Kong International Film Festival 2026
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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There is a moment about halfway through Luca Guadagnino's "After the Hunt" where Julia Roberts' character, Professor Alma Olsson, sits alone in her Yale office, a glass of cheap whiskey sweating in her hand, and stares at the spines of the books she has written. She is supposed to have answers. That is what philosophy professors do. But her face—that extraordinary face, which Roberts has learned to use like a weather system—tells us everything her character cannot say. She believes one thing. She feels another. And the space between them is the whole movie.
Guadagnino, who gave us the sun-soaked longing of "Call Me by Your Name" and the cannibal romance of "Bones and All," has gone to New England for the winter of his career. The film is shot in cold light, grays and deep blues, the kind of light that makes stone buildings look like mausoleums. Malik Hassan Sayeed's cinematography is precise, almost cruel. He finds the shadows under eyes, the sweat on upper lips, the way a hand trembles over a coffee cup. This is not a film that wants you to feel good. It wants you to feel trapped.
The trap is this: Andrew Garfield's Hank, a charismatic vulgarian of a professor, has been accused of sexual assault by a student named Maggie, played by Ayo Edebiri with such raw, unsentimental intelligence that you want to give her a medal and then hide her from the world. Hank is Alma's friend. She believes him. She also believes Maggie. She cannot do both. The film does not resolve this contradiction. It deepens it.
Garfield is slippery here in ways I haven't seen from him before. He plays Hank as a man who has weaponized his own self-doubt, who uses his apparent vulnerability to deflect scrutiny. You want to like him. He wants you to like him. That is the problem. Edebiri, meanwhile, does something harder: she plays a victim who refuses to perform victimhood. Maggie is angry, yes, but more than that she is precise. She has done the math. She knows what this accusation will cost her. She makes it anyway.
The screenplay by Nora Garrett is too smart for its own good sometimes. The middle section gets bogged down in tenure politics and Title IX procedures, and I found myself checking my watch, which is never a good sign in a movie this serious about itself. But then Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross will drop that ticking-clock percussion into the mix, and you remember: oh right, this is a thriller. Just one where the bomb is a question.
The ending has divided people. Guadagnino breaks the fourth wall, shows us the cameras, the crew, the artifice. It's the kind of move that announces its own brilliance a little too loudly. And yet. And yet. When Roberts turns to the lens, her face caught in that cold blue light, she asks us a question that the film refuses to answer. Who are you to judge? Who is anyone?
"After the Hunt" is too long. It is too cold. It trusts its audience more than most movies do, which means it will frustrate the ones who want clarity. But it is also the work of a director at the height of his powers and an actress who has found a role that uses everything she has learned about silence. I watched it twice. The second time, I noticed that Alma's office has a window she never opens. The third time, I might notice why.
After the Hunt is a demanding, uncomfortable, essential film. It is not for everyone. It is for anyone who has ever believed one thing and done another. (Neo, 2026)
