Though his subject matter ranges from queer coming-of-age dramas to mind games on the tennis court to cannibal love stories (Bones and All), what is consistent is his ambition to push audiences. After the Hunt, in particular, leans into discomfort. The film follows Julia Roberts as Alma, a Yale professor whose student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) accuses a fellow professor, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of assault. Alma’s carefully constructed life begins to crumble as she grapples with who to believe.
After its Venice debut, After the Hunt sparked plenty of conversation—and one viral moment in which an Italian reporter asked Garfield, Roberts, and Edebiri a tone-deaf question about the end of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. “I mean, it’s a bit embarrassing, for the part of the journalist,” says Guadagnino. “It’s a little bit tone deaf. This movie wants you to think that it’s better to talk to one another and to listen to one another, instead of going for your route. Probably the journalist had only one idea in her mind, and she couldn’t adapt herself to the moment.”
But After the Hunt is a movie for this moment, says Guadagnino—even if the story is set mostly in 2019, with an epilogue that takes place in the present. Critics have compared it to other films that have tried to capture the post-#MeToo moment, such as Tár, Women Talking, and Bombshell. Guadagnino doesn’t agree with that label; he recently told Variety that this is “a bit of a lazy way to describe it.” But he did aim to reflect the current cultural and political atmosphere.
Though they finished filming in August 2024, Guadagnino didn’t finish the movie’s epilogue until the summer of 2025, after Donald Trump had been reelected and months of national turmoil had already unfolded. In that final scene, Robert’s Alma has recovered from her fall from grace and is now in a position of power once more. “I had this kind of strong intuition that we had to have Alma going up again,” he says. “It sounded kind of extreme, but then look at where we are—look at who went to power again.”
