Producers: Brian Grazer, Luca Guadagnino, Jeb Brody and Allan Mandelbaum   Director: Luca Guadagnino   Screenplay: Nora Garrett  Cast: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny, Lío Mehiel, David Leiber, Thaddea Graham, Will Price, Ariyan Kassam, Christine Dye and Burgess Byrd   Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios

Grade: C

Prolific director Luca Guadagnino begins his latest with starkly simple black-and-white titles and a jazzy underscore that inevitably call to mind the style of every Woody Allen film you can remember—a cheeky choice for a film about allegations of sexual harassment in a rarefied intellectual environment.  And Nora Garrett’s script for “After the Hunt”—a title that fully applies only when one reaches the coda—is at its core a “he said/she said” story set in 2019, at the pinnacle of the “Me Too” movement.

But anyone expecting a cut-and-dried, unambiguous treatment will be sorely disappointed.  In fact the film is a positive riot of ambiguity that, in the end, wrings bleakly humorous observations about academia, accusations of sexual misconduct and so-called cancel culture out of an upper-crust melodrama with semi-tragic overtones.  The picture is a muddle unsatisfying to the very end, but there’s a method, however misguided, behind the narrative clumsiness and misdirection, and there are nuggets of brilliance along the way.  One might be aggravated by this “Hunt,” but will probably be fascinated by it too.

The focus of the story is Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts), a philosophy professor at Yale whose seminars are dynamic performances that exhibit both her arrogant sense of command and her glee in inflicting withering criticism on her cowed students.  (Yet she’s revered by them, it seems.)

At a party that she and her psychiatrist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) are hosting as the film begins, she and her younger colleague Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) are the showiest of the faculty among the group, while the grad students in attendance, most noticeably Alma’s prize pupil Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), whose doctoral thesis she’s mentoring, mostly sit quietly and watch the academic antics.  So does Frederik, smiling impishly from the sidelines while preparing food for the guests.

In the course of the evening some major plot points emerge.  Hank, whose semi-obnoxious manner and sarcastic banter mark him as both charismatic and off-putting (as well as flirtatious), and cool, composed Alma are both up for tenure (in truth both actors seem rather old to be at their sixth year of teaching, Hank by a little and Roberts by a lot); Frederik wonders whether their friendship could survive if only one of them were chosen. 

And there’s something unsettling about Maggie.  Not only is she acutely sensitive as a black woman whose presence on an Ivy League campus might be thought the result of preferential treatment rather than merit; the fact that she’s the daughter of incredibly rich parents whose gifts have benefited the university she obscures with an ostensibly radical lifestyle.  She’s also sneaky: while visiting a bathroom and searching for a roll of toilet paper, she discovers, hidden in a cupboard, an envelope containing materials about Alma’s past, and eagerly rifles through them, nursing what they tell her as ammunition.  Then she leaves the party with Hank.

The next day she comes back to see Alma and tearfully tells her that drunken Hank had walked her to her apartment and then sexually assaulted her.  She intends going public with the accusation and asks for Alma’s support.  Not long afterward Hank meets Alma at a restaurant and swears that the charge is untrue; he explains that he’d found evidence of plagiarism in Maggie’s thesis (on ethics, no less) and told the girl of his intention to report it, and that her accusation was designed to preempt an investigation.

The situation quickly escalates.  Hank is abruptly fired, and Maggie takes her story to the press, attacking Alma’s dithering in the process.  Alma berates Maggie, goading the girl into slapping her, and insults her roommate, trans activist Alex (Lio Mehiel).  She also consults her friend Kim (Chloë Sevigny), a psychologist who serves as a student counselor, about Maggie, but also forges an order on Kim’s prescription pad for opioids to self-medicate a series of crippling abdominal cramps from which she’s suffering.  Revelation of that will lead Dean Thomas (David Leiber) to suspend her tenure process.  An unexpected visit by Hank to the apartment Alma has kept on the sly proves that their relationship has been far more than merely professional, and a medical emergency ultimately leads to the revelation of the secret about Alma’s past, involving accusations Alma she once made as a child about an older man, with tragic result. It’s that incident Maggie had discovered in her snooping.

Then there’s a postscript, set five years later: a meeting between Alma and Maggie that shows the changed circumstances of them both, and represents a reconciliation of sorts that’s also a confession, despite the surface amity as frigid as the Connecticut winter outside.  It doesn’t really resolve anything, particularly the question of who—Maggie or Hank—was telling the truth about the night that changed things for everyone; the behavior of them both—Hank not only was outraged over his treatment but later was sexually aggressive toward Alma, while Maggie was more pleased with herself than embarrassed—made them both suspect. Indeed, the implication is that the “truth” was different for each person (or perhaps indifferent as far as either was concerned), and that, now as then, it can’t be simply pinned down. Moreover the scene ends with a word that abruptly pivots from the supposed “truth” of what we’re just seen to remind us it’s fiction, despite an opening caption that told us “It happened at Yale.”

Throughout “After the Hunt” almost makes a point of straining credulity; if you’ll looking for rational behavior in this academic setting—an exaggerated, satirical one—you’ll be hard-pressed to find a shred of it, except in Sevigny’s Kim who, despite a haircut that must be seen to be disbelieved, is all too convincingly recognizable in her pose of disdainful cynicism.  Alma, Maggie and Hank are all over-the-top characters, each in his or her own way, and the actors embody them with passion, though Edebiri’s is a cunning, simmering anger as opposed to the rage that Roberts and Garfield exhibit more openly.  Even Frederik who, even more than Kim, represents a voice of reason in the wacky scholarly community, is hardly conventional; there’s a wicked gleam in his eye as he analyzes what’s going on, and he can shift from solicitude for Alma to jealousy over her attachments to others with drama queen fervor, as when he flounces about the kitchen distractingly while Alma and Maggie are struggling to have a serious conversation. 

But it’s actually more fun watching Stuhlbarg go to town with the character than it is witnessing Robert and Garfield, good as they are, engage in their academic games or erupt as the cruelty of their circumstances bear down on them, or Edebiri claim moral superiority while manipulating them to her own ends.  Among the supporting cast a special nod is due to Leiber, who in a relatively few scenes captures the wimpiness of academic administrators who, despite feigned annoyance over having to attend to style over substance, have spent their careers honing the ability to do exactly that.

On the technical level Guadagnino is fortunate in the work of production designer Stefano Baisi, who contrives to make British locations a convincing facsimile of the American ones, and cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, who captures the faded elegance of both the public and private places.  Marco Costa’s elliptical, often frantic editing distracts as often as it enlivens, and the modernist tings and twangs of the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross irritate rather than entrance, but their efforts contribute to keeping the atmosphere unsettling despite the surface decorum.

As a commentary on the excesses of professional and sexual politics in elite American academia, “After the Hunt” comes across as a bit behind the times, as well as opaque and messy about what it’s trying to say.  But at least it keeps you intrigued, if not satisfied.