After The Hunt 2025 is an exploitation film about the #MeToo
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by Blender Dumbass
Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".
In my article about Corruption of the audience I observed the talent of Luca Guadagnino in this regard. I was mostly talking about his film Bones and All where he managed to humanize cannibalism. But I think with his 2025 picture After the Hunt he is finally attempting the hardest challenge yet. ↩ Reply
On the surface After the Hunt is conceptually similar to the Ari Aster's film Eddington. Both are 2025 films. Both are from directors who do very good horror. And both are exploration films about the political climate of the last couple of years. While Eddington is focusing on the covid-19 pandemic, and the surrounding political turmoil, After The Hunt is more interested in the pre-pandemic era of #MeToo and the turmoil that happened then. ↩ Reply
It is an exploitation film because it exploits the current political turmoils to draw people's attention to the movie. But ultimately it is doing something along the way that I find quite brilliant. ↩ Reply
As far as I can tell, both Ari Aster and Luca Guadagnino appear to have a nuanced and great understanding of the whole thing. And both of them do not afraid to learn, or think through, or even discuss the opinions that they find to be of the opposing nature to whatever they might believe to be true. And while the movies are exemplifying a sort of dialogue between the two dominant political parties, they both also draw attention to the underlying mechanisms / absurdities that lead us to be so divided in the first place. ↩ Reply
The main plot of the film dissects an unsolved conflict of interest between a student and a professor. We are given good evidence to believe that the student ( Ayo Edebiri ) was raped by the professor ( Andrew Garfield ) and also an equal amount of evidence to suggest that the student made up the story as a cover of sorts, because the professor caught her cheating at her exams. ↩ Reply
The film never resolves this tension. Instead it uses this tension to examine various philosophical ideas under a microscope. It uses the college setting ( with multiple characters being somehow knowledgeable about philosophy ) to insert direct quotes from various philosophy studies directly into the dialogue of the film, making the ideas so much richer. ↩ Reply
Then the film dares to do something quite interesting. ↩ Reply
The entire movie there is a secondary mystery about a hidden envelope full of old photographs that belongs to our main character, a professor of philosophy played by Julia Roberts. At the start of the film the student character stumbles upon this envelope. And by the end we slowly piece together what this envelope refers to. We see photos of a man, with hearts drawn around him. We have Roberts' performance as she takes out this envelope to remember something in her past. We understand that it was somebody someone she loved. And then we understand that there was probably some connection to that love and her current responsibility at managing the case of this student and her allegations against Garfield's character. ↩ Reply
In the end of the film we learn that this man was her childhood crush, with whom she had sex. And who later dumped her for somebody more his age. For which she avenged him, by revealing that he illegally slept with her, which ruined his life and eventually drawn him to suicide. This happens in a conversation with her husband ( Michael Stuhlbarg ) where he counters her story with his professionalism ( he is a therapist ) by telling her that it is okay to blame him for what happened to her. We get a back and forth. A little tension. And it seems like it is resolved, but it isn't. The movie keeps it at the exact 50% state of not being sure who to blame. c:0 ↩ Reply
Now, just as a side note, Guadagnino did something absolutely amazing in one scene using Michael Stuhlbarg. There was a rather boring looking dinner table scene where two characters talk to one another. So to break the boringness Guadagnino decided to steal a scene idea from Steven Spielberg's movie The Post. In the Spielberg's movie, the main characters are looking at documents, which is even tedious and boring by the opinions of the characters involved. So he adds a little girl who is trying to sell lemonade on the street near the house. It is a daughter of one of the characters who is looking at the papers. The girl quickly realizes that she can sell the lemonade much better inside, to the people who are parsing those documents. And while technically the scene is about them discovering some insane political plot, the scene is secretly about this girl selling her lemonade. Which adds so much live to it. ↩ Reply
In After The Hunt Guadagnino was faced with a similar problem. A simple dialogue scene where both characters just sit on their chairs and talk. So he added a third element: an obnoxiously annoying husband character desperately trying to draw attention to himself, while pretending to be polite. This is comedy gold. ↩ Reply
Anyway, back too the subject matter... ↩ Reply
We cut to 5 years later, in the early 2025 ( like the movie goes full meta for a moment ) where Roberts character meets the student and they seem to be good friends now, despite opposing viewpoints on their respective experiences. In that scene 2 very interesting things happen. First, the student reveals her engagement to a woman ( she is gay ) that is twice her age. And then in the very end of the film, taking the meta aspect of the film to a whole new level, Luca Guadagnino himself is heard yelling "cut" before the credits roll. ↩ Reply
I have absolutely no idea what were the intentions of the film by the writer Nora Garrett, but Luca Guadagnino chose this script and passed it through the filters in his mind, before it came into being. So, first of all, something in the script attracted Luca to direct it. And then he added his himselfness to it through actually doing the work to make it into a movie, which sometimes requires tweaking a few things. ↩ Reply
I think Luca is tiptoeing into trying to remove the "a" from his first name. I think he is trying to beat Luc Besson. And specifically, I think he is walking around and feeling the waters before committing to his ultimate test. To a movie with the ultimate corruption of the audience. The Luca Guadagnino's own attempt at Leon: The Professional. c:0 ↩ Reply
All the way back in 2015 with A Bigger Splash Luca Guadagnino already played with the concept of minor-adult relationships. What he usually shows in his films is hard to call "child-abuse" because the characters are almost on the edge of being 18 most of the time. In A Bigger Splash Dakota Johnson plays a character who is unclear if underage or not. And yet she seduces one of the clearly adult characters. In 2017 Luca made Call Me By Your Name which everybody conveniently forgot was about specifically a 17 year old boy in love with specifically 24 year old guy. The film plays like a straight forward romance. And then in 2022 with Bones and All Luca took that 17 year old boy and turned him into 20 something year old cannibal in love with just recently turned 18 cannibal girl. In which case a reading could be made that cannibalism in that movie stands for minor-adult-relationships. He even stole Mark Rylance from The BFG to play the abusive kind of, rapist cannibal. I'm not making this shit up. If you read my reviews of The BFG and Don't Look Up you know the thematic significance of casting specifically Rylance in this specific role. ↩ Reply
Also quite interesting is that both Call Me By Your Name and After The Hunt end on a scene some time after the main events of the story. And both of those scenes happen during winter. And just before that scene there is a scene where Michael Stuhlbarg's character has a dialogue with the main character about the events of the story. Where seemingly the theme of the whole thing should be revealed. ↩ Reply
In Call Me By Your Name he gives a monologue about how it is absolutely amazing that our boy went though the experience though which he went ( with that grown man ). There is zero criticism of the relationship. The whole message seems to be acceptance. Hm... ↩ Reply
But then in After The Hunt the same scene is an argument. A confrontation. One side is saying "blame the guy" and the other "blame the girl" one side is saying that it was abuse even if it didn't feel like it. The other is saying that it was love. There is a balance. Why? ↩ Reply
Well because she is not a boy. Because the ages were more extreme. Because doing it not balanced will get the movie into too much of a hot water. But then maybe because in Call Me By Your Name the ages of the characters are only mentioned maybe twice in the whole movie and even that in blink-and-you-will-miss-it moments. So by the time Stuhlbarg gives his monologue about acceptance, nobody remembers the age. Nobody think about it. While After The Hunt dares to confront the audience with the idea directly. The movie tries to argue not that it's bad. But that it could be both bad and good. In the same time. For different people it would be different. If anything, this is the ballsiest movie Luca Guadagnino ever did. ↩ Reply
That is of course until the next one. He is in the middle of making another exploitation film, where apparently Andrew Garfield will be playing Sam Altman ( the CEO of Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT ). LOL ↩ Reply
Happy Hacking!!! ↩ Reply
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Troler
c:0 The movie keeps it at the exact 50% state of not being sure who to blame.
⤴ ViewThis fact can easily drive people mad. Brilliant strategy. Its downside would be lack of satisfaction, which is the intended goal. That can bleed into the entire movie. Reveal too much and the movie is entertaining for few watches. Say nothing and there'll be no suspense. Strike a balance and the viewers are going to keep coming and coming, trying to crack the mystery.
I think Luca is tiptoeing into trying to remove the "a" from his first name. I think he is trying to beat Luc Besson. And specifically, I think he is walking around and feeling the waters before committing to his ultimate test. To a movie with the ultimate corruption of the audience. The Luca Guadagnino's own attempt at Leon: The Professional.
⤴ ViewNow that is a reveal I didn't expect.
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