After the Hunt

I don't understand the point of After the Hunt, and, after seeing it, I'm not sure anyone involved in making it knows either. Set at Yale, we get a he said/she said script from the perspective of neither character involved in an alleged assult that happens off-camera.

Instead, our main character is a mostly self-absorbed professor (Julia Roberts) who is the mentor of the a potentially untrustworthy woman (Ayo Edebiri) who we see steal from the professor early on claiming she was sexually assaulted, and at the same time the best friend of notably flirtatious man (Andrew Garfield) who suggests the young woman made up the entire story for attention and to deflect from her largely plagiarized work.

A bit frozen by events, and honestly more concerned about her own illegal drug use and getting tenure, Roberts' character is given plenty of reason to question what might have happened (although, honestly, I'm not sure she cares).

Not really after the truth, although the script does imply what likely happened, After the Hunt is more a character study about some deeply unhappy academics each wrapped up in their own lives who all struggle to deal with a situation that breaks them out of their ordinary routine. I wouldn't say the film is anti-education, but there's little here to suggest anything is being learned, or could be learned, in the type of environment presented here. There's also various subplots about Roberts' character, her relationship to an older man in her youth, her stealing prescription medication from a friend, and the odd state of her current marriage.

The film offers an interesting acting exercise for both Roberts and Garfield, and to a lesser extent Edebiri, but there's no real point or resolution to the events. Nor do we really care about any of these characters or what actually happened (largely because the script doesn't care but also because no one on-screen is worth investing any emotion). The film is so aimless that (in what I'm guessing was studio imposed) we get a tacked-on epilogue at the end solely for the purpose of framing a point that inexplicably still flails around, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

• Title: After the Hunt
• IMDb: link