After the Hunt: A Review - Philosophical Phonies in a Woke Soap Opera

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An incoherent and inconsequential dramatization of the madness of #MeToo and woke campus politics.

After the Hunt, directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Julia Roberts, is a #MeToo/campus politics drama set at the Yale University Philosophy Department.

After the Hunt, which runs two-hours and twenty-minutes, landed at theatres on October 10th of this year with a pronounced thud. The film, despite being helmed by critically adored Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino, and starring Oscar winning movie star Julia Roberts, was a box office bomb and critical failure.

I am usually not in synch with audience or even critical opinion, and so it was that I went into watching After the Hunt – which is now available to stream on Amazon Prime, curious to see what all the negative fuss was about.

I have never been a fan of Luca Guadagnino – and find his films, like Challengers and Call Me by Your Name, to be egregiously overrated, or of Julia Roberts, who in my terribly unhumble opinion is a suffocatingly limited talent.

That said, the subject matter of After the Hunt, which deals with the woke hysteria that has infected nearly every part of our culture over the last decade, is something that I think deserves true artistic examination…and I thought maybe, just maybe, Guadagnino might have stumbled on to making a decent movie about a crucial topic.

And then I watched the movie.

After the Hunt truly earned its box office and critical failing. The film, which was scripted by Nora Garrett, is atrociously written. The plotlines of the film are much like the characters, poorly thought out and insipidly vapid.

There is so much superfluous nonsense in this movie, surrounded by philosophical posing and preening, that it feels like you’ve got lost wandering around in a poorly designed liberal haunted house in the MSNBC green room. It is also inhabited by some of the most loathsome and unlikable characters in recent memory and it is relentlessly pedantic, pretentious and petty in its personal politics.

The woke topics tackled in the film are just as dull and dim-witted as the woke issues of our time, but they are so clumsily dramatized they end up feeling like something a freshman philosophy major would write if they were trying to create a daytime soap opera for an ill-conceived Ivy League television network.  

There are some plot devices in this movie that are so ham-handed it actually left me shaking my head. For example, there is a crucial plot point in the first act (I won’t give it away to avoid spoilers) that is so amateurish in design and execution it felt like something from teen dramedy on Nickelodeon or something. The same is true for the deep, dark secret Julia Roberts’ character is hiding. And don’t get me started on the epilogue of the film which is jaw-droppingly inane…Yikes!

Speaking of Julia Roberts…here is a weird thing about this movie…Julia Roberts is very good in it as Alma, a respected Philosophy professor hungry to get tenure. Now as previously stated I have never thought much of her as an actress, but considering the slop she was given to work with in this film, she does a remarkable job of putting it together.  What was particularly affecting was her physical performance and her ability to convey physical pain.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cast are nowhere near as successful as Ms. Roberts.

Andrew Garfield plays Hank, a cool dude philosophy professor who may or may not have crossed the line with one of his students. Garfield turns his performance up to eleven and turns down his believability to about a two. Garfield is so performative in the role it feels like he’s doing an SNL skit.

The same is true of Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Frederick, Alma’s cuckolded, sad sack psychotherapist husband. Stuhlbarg’s Frederick is so incoherent and odd it feels like he is doing a Coen Brothers comedy and not a #MeToo drama. Good for him.

The worst acting in this film…and the worst acting I’ve seen in quite some time, comes from Ayo Edebiri, who plays Maggie, a lesbian philosophy student who is Alma’s protégé and the daughter of extravagantly wealthy parents.

I have never watched The Bear, so I’ve never seen Edebiri act before…but she is an absolutely abysmal actress in After the Hunt. She is so devoid of any acting skill or charisma it is actually shocking.

Guadagnino cast his art dealer David Leiber in this film to play a dean at Yale, and he is as awful as you’d expect a rank amateur to be in that performance…but here’s the thing…as terrible as he is…he is better than Ayo Edebiri.

Edebiri may be great in The Bear and is totally miscast here, I don’t know, but what I do know is that she is unbearably awful in this movie and it is truly embarrassing. She is so bad I wonder if she’ll ever work in film again.

Now, maybe Luca Guadagnino is playing 69-dimensional chess and he cast the talent deficient woman of color Edebiri, and used the shitty script from millennial white woman Nora Garrett, as some sort of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion performance art to show how insidious wokeness is in the arts. If so, good for him, then his god-awful movie is actually a worthwhile piece of meta-art.

Of course, the truth is Guadagnino didn’t do any of that with the intention of exposing DEI for the cancer that it is on the arts, instead he did it because he is infected by that same cancer.

One thing that I do think is true is that Guadagnino, who is a Generation X-er, used his film to take Gen Z and millennials to task for their absurd and ridiculous fragilities, tortured philosophies and performative politics, something that two other Generation X directors did this year as well – PT Anderson with One Battle After Another, and Ari Aster with Eddington. Both Anderson and Aster certainly took on the generation gap in much smarter and more successful ways than Guadagnino.

Ultimately, After the Hunt could have been a very interesting and even useful film. But unfortunately, Guadagnino isn’t skilled enough to overcome a truly amateurish script and so this film flounders from start to finish – devoid of drama, comedy, humanity and insight.

The topics raised in After the Hunt are definitely worthy of serious examination and dramatization, but this movie does those issues, and its audience, a disservice, as it never truly brings an adequate level of artistry to this fiery philosophical debate.

©2025

Luca Guadagnino Streaming Double Feature: Queer and Challengers - What Else Can I Say...Everyone is Gay!

****THESE REVIEWS CONTAIN SOME SPOILERS!! THESE ARE NOT SPOILER FREE REVIEWS!!!****

 Queer: 2 out of 5 stars – SKIP IT.

Challengers: 2 out of 5 stars – SKIP IT.

Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino put out two films last year, Challengers and Queer, both of which garnered at least some awards buzz, but to the chagrin of some, neither got any Oscar nominations.

Having missed both in the theatre, I watched them on streamers recently and I have some thoughts.

Guadagnino came to the fore of film in America with his 2017 Oscar-nominated film Call Me by Your Name, starring Timothee Chalamet, which chronicled the gay love affair between a teenage boy and a man in his mid to late twenties.

Call Me by Your Name was showered with praise, including multiple Oscar nominations, but I found the film to be rather poorly constructed and executed, cinematically flaccid and philosophically infantile.

The thing that stood out the most to me in that movie is a monologue delivered near the end of the film by the teenage boy’s father, who reveals that he might be kinda gay and bemoaning the fact that he didn’t have a torrid gay affair as a young man. My reaction to that scene was to quote the Nirvana song “All Apologies” where Kurt Cobain sings the unforgettable lyric “what else can I say, everyone is gay”.

When I watched Challengers (now streaming on MGM+), which opened in April of 2024 and follows the ups and downs of a love triangle between a woman and two male professional tennis players over the course of a decade or so, that lyric was at the top of my notes after watching the film conclude in the absolutely gayest manner possible when both men realize in the middle of a big tennis match that they actually want each other and not the woman. What else can I say…everyone is gay, indeed.   

I avoided watching Queer, which opened in November of 2024, for quite some time because I assumed it would be the same old thing from Guadagnino. I finally watched it the other day (it is streaming on Max) and literally laughed out loud when Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch – who do the music for the film and for Challengers, opened the movie with Nirvana’s “All Apologies”, most notably the line “what else can I say, everyone is gay”. Bravo!

The reason I share this anecdote is because Luca Guadagnino, who is gay, seems completely incapable of understanding that there actually are people in the world who are not, in fact, gay.  Dare I say it…the reality is that the overwhelming majority of people in the world are not…you know…gay. According to some polls the percentage of gay and lesbian people in the world is roughly 3%, but in Luca Guadagino’s world it feels more like 103%.

In the past forty years or so homosexuality has transformed from being a much stigmatized and often criminalized trait into being a celebrated and shame-free lifestyle. It seems cinema, particularly gay cinema, is having a hard time catching up with the normalization of this once oppressed sexual orientation.

Let’s start with Queer. Queer, which is based on William Burroughs book of the same name, stars Daniel Craig as William Lee, a gay American ex-pat living in Mexico City in the 1950s who spends his time drinking, doing drugs and chasing men….definitely not in that order.

Queer could’ve, and maybe should’ve been great, or at least been celebrated by a film industry desperate to signal it’s progressive bona fides. But the film falls completely flat despite its witty Nirvana quoting opening.

Queer is such a bleak and dismal glimpse into the gay world (or A gay world) that I wouldn’t be surprised if some homophobic pastors  showed it to “confused” teens at gay Evangelical conversion camps.

All of the gay people in this film are the most repugnant and repellent human beings imaginable as they are all desperate, despairing, depressing and depraved. If they are supposed to be an accurate representation of gay men of that or any other era, then that is quite an indictment of that community. One can only assume, and hope, that the film is just focusing on one particularly grotesque group of gays that are not representative.

Daniel Craig, most famous for playing James Bond, no doubt took this role – which some might call gay-baiting, in order to get an Oscar, but his performance felt incredibly mannered to me and distractingly off the mark.

Craig, who has been the subject of quite compelling gay rumors himself, plays Lee as a sort of disgusting desperation incarnate. Lee is less gay as he is obsessive over gay sex, and he comes across like a two-bit actor playing Tennessee Williams in a community theatre production in Blaine, Missouri.

Lee isn’t the only repulsive character in the film, as Jason Schwartzman’s Joe Guidry is so revolting it sort of boggles the mind. That none of these people are even remotely interesting is secondary to how unappealing they are to spend time with.

The plot for Queer lacks any sort of emotional coherence, and devolves into a sort of dreamlike fantasia in the final third, which undercuts whatever gritty and grimy reality was established in the first two acts.

Ultimately, Queer felt like an over-indulgent exercise in gay exploitation rather than exploration, with Craig being so superficially committed to his character’s gayness it appeared like he just wanted to kiss a man in public to see if he could get away with it.

Challengers was the hipster choice for film of the year in 2024, but apparently, I am not a hipster because I found it to be so ridiculous as to be inane.

The film, which stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, is supposed to be this sexy jaunt through the world of tennis, but it, and its two lead males, is so transparently gay from the get-go, and features such unappealing dullards as the main actors, that I found watching it to be a tedious undertaking.

Let’s start with Zendaya. I just don’t get it. I admit I have not seen all of her work, for instance I tried watching the HBO drama Euphoria and thought it was garbage so I bailed…so maybe she is great in that…who knows? But everything I have seen her in she is an awful, anemic actress. The Spider-Man movies, Dune, and now Challengers. Just consistently bad, boring, dead-eyed and lifeless.

Josh O’Connor is supposed to bring a bevy of sex appeal to his role of Patrick, a talented but down on his luck tennis player, but he strikes me as a dullard and dopey looking doofus – which is probably why he was so good as Prince Charles in The Crown.

As forgettable as O’Connor is in this film, Mike Faist, who plays Art, his tennis and love rival, is like the invisible man. Faist, who I last saw in Spielberg’s useless remake of West Side Story, is a song and dance man, good for him, but he is so devoid of charisma he might as well be a tumbleweed. Good lord.

As Challengers goes on the story becomes more and more grating, as do the performances, until it all climaxes with the single most ridiculous, and gay, climax imaginable for a tennis movie…when Patrick and Art literally fall into each other’s arms in the middle of a tennis match.

What struck me about Challengers in the context of Guadagnino’s other work, is that the director really does seem to be incapable of understanding that people could not be gay.

Guadagnino’s approach on Challengers (and the father character in Call Me by Your Name) would be like a straight director making a movie about the Gay Men’s Chorus of San Francisco but the gay men in the chorus are actually, deep down, secretly straight.

Having typed out that last paragraph I now realize that I may have just revealed a billion-dollar movie idea…so remember that this material is copyrighted!!

In all seriousness, Challengers could have been an interesting movie set in a unique world, and the same is true of Queer, but Guadagnino has such a repetitive, one-track mind, that he is incapable of bringing any nuance, subtlety, intricacy or dramatic depth to his work. And so we are left with a one-note representation of gayness as some irrepressible truth that lies deep within us all. Sigh.

The bottom line is that both Challengers and Queer could have, and should have, been good, but neither rises to even the minimal level of being interesting, never mind entertaining.

In other words, you do not have to waste your time watching Queer or Challengers because I wasted my time watching Queer and Challengers. You’re welcome.

©2025