There is a moment early on in Luca Guadagnino's After The Hunt where Maggie, a vocal and enthusiastic philosophy student, and Frederik, a wry and airy therapist, share a kiss. Our four main characters are saying their goodbyes after a slightly drunken salon held in the home of Alma (and Frederik, her husband), and in attempting to kiss each other goodbye, Maggie and Frederik briefly lock lips. No one comments amongst the chatter. Frederik looks slightly taken aback and Maggie asks if he's okay. It was an accident, after all. No fuss is made of it. Barely a beat later, Alma and Hank, a swaggering mess of a man (and also a professor), kiss as well, like muscle memory. Neither look apologetic. This is blatantly their dynamic and no one has anything to say about it. This one moment, the physicality, the ease of it, tells you everything you need to know about these people, and how their inability to confront what is directly in front of them will cause everything to implode.
Often, stories about sexual assault emphasise silence - how we don't know what to say, when to say it or how to approach fixing things, so characters are left to dangle in the agonising nothing that is language. After The Hunt isn't about silence. This is a film about people who talk too much so they don't have to reflect on what it is that they are saying. Set intermittently in a philosophy class, a therapist's office, a bedroom, our characters are used to approaching the world from a theoretical point of view. So when one of them accuses the other of sexual violence, she is met with suspicion and thrown under the bus with claims of opportunism in the face of her mediocrity. Because these discussions have thus far been limited to the hypothetical, none of them, but especially Alma, are prepared to be the principled person they are required to be, as they are used to being materially untethered from violence in the shelter of the university halls.
Characters who believe they are kind and progressive are quick to anger at students who can’t seem to handle the brutality of the ‘real world’ and position themselves as the last defenders against the perpetual coddling of young people. No safe spaces, no trigger warnings - sometimes things exist to make you uncomfortable. This is detailed with the irony that the university has sheltered these teachers from having to engage with any kind of conflict that isn’t speculative, especially if it threatens their cloistered lifestyles where they can host salons to discuss the ideas of race, gender and class, without ever touching the realities of it.
Academic spaces are presented as a playground for spiritual growth, the theoretical and the internal. It makes sense that a university campus becomes the key fighting ground for pointless generation wars, identity politics, and the myriad of emotionally barren responses to sexual violence. We have characters going catatonic when trying to deal the reality of coming forward with allegations towards someone who has caused harm, on all sides, and I don’t resent people who bristle at the idea of turning a painful reality into a thought exercise, even if it makes sense for what the story is trying to say. I tend to not rate films very highly if I believe that they exist only to gesture broadly at the current moment in an attempt to masquerade as an 'important' movie. Not everyone has something interesting to say, even when the script itself is insisting on its own significance.
Imitative, as Guadagnino often is, of the icy, prestige social drama, it reduces its characters generationally and ideologically in the hopes of finding a seed of truth in what are mostly pretences. It feels hard to forgive a film for limiting its only non-binary character to a distant romantic partner and then the leader of the feral, liberal arts transsexuals attacking the poor rich white lady professor in the middle of campus. But then it feels hard to forgive the film altogether for its general lack of interest in humanity, depicting the world as dry and without human touch. Our characters are left with meagre options - the schism sexual violence causes, the temptation of infidelity and the routine of a heterosexual marriage that is no longer convincing to either party. The characters here have a lot to say and Guadagnino's gaze only emphasises how little they are really touching each other, and more importantly, how much they seem to want to.
The relationship between Alma and Maggie is by far the most compelling part of the film, and clearly the part that Guadagnino relishes the drama and historonics of, though I will admit that this is atypically restrained for him. He often positions heterosexuality as performative, queerness as a form of identity-building and desire itself as transformative, though in a way that feels life-altering, often ruinous, rather than liberating. Maggie unconsciously trying to recreate events of Alma's past traumas as a way to feel closer to her deliberately blurs the line between desire and identification, as is common in queer films. Conversely, Alma will not admit that it is desire that motivates her actions, maybe because she doesn't like where that train of thought leads her. Does she continue to experience attraction to Hank after he has been accused of causing grievous harm? Does she secretly desire Maggie's attention as a way of bolstering her self-esteem and as a distraction from her evidently dead marriage? Desire becomes a road that often leads to nowhere. Despite Alma's coldness, her wants eat away at her, culminating in guilt and sickness with nowhere to go and no one to aim it at. Because, in a lot of ways, she hasn't said an honest thing in decades.