'After the Hunt' review: Julia Roberts stars in topical drama

Julia Roberts plays Alma, a Yale philosophy professor, in the tangled web woven by "After the Hunt." Her colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) is accused of sexually assaulting a student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), who quickly rallies the student body, the school newspaper and Yale itself to her side. Alma is the lone holdout, for some reason, but no matter — Maggie knows a secret from Alma’s past that could make for good leverage.

At one point, the cornered prof lashes out at her student, calling her every name in the book: pampered, privileged, wealthy, weak. "Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable," Alma sneers.

That line, which has become the movie’s slogan in trailers and on posters, sounds like a dog whistle — or maybe more like an air horn — to graying liberals who feel that the younger generation has lost its woke mind. Directed by Luca Guadagnino ("Call Me by Your Name") and written by Nora Garrett, "After the Hunt" is the latest movie to take aim at the overly sensitive under-30 demo, following the dark satire "Eddington" and the action thriller "One Battle After Another" (in which even old Marxist revolutionaries can’t abide the tender new lefties). "After the Hunt" pushes all manner of discomfiting buttons, from race to gender to income, but here's the problem: It always quickly lifts its finger before the alarms really start to ring.

Maggie, who’s not only queer but so wealthy that her family funds library wings, seems an unwise target for even a drunken professor. And by keeping Maggie's accusation impossibly vague — "He crossed a line" — the film raises serious doubts about her veracity. What’s more, Hank seemed about to expose her as a plagiarist. Still, Maggie insists that Alma, as a woman, should believe her story on principle.

Roberts plays Alma as too old, too wise and too clever for that. But for all her steely confidence, Alma has some major weak points: an addiction to pain killers (Chloë Sevigny is her psychiatrist friend Kim), a doting but neglected husband (Michael Stuhlbarg, funny and tender, and one of the sneakiest scene-stealers around) and a brazenly open sexual arrangement with Garfield's slightly sleazy Hank. So why does Alma later throw her lover under the bus while keeping Maggie at arm’s length? It has something to do with that long-buried secret — one of the film’s only real surprises. That, and the fact that Yale allowed such a potentially controversial film to be shot on its campus.

But "After the Hunt" isn’t controversial at all. It presents itself as a psychological thriller with a topical streak, but it winds up merely toying with its ideas. Characters drop heady names (Kierkegaard, Foucault) and theorize grandly (everything is "systemic" this and "patriarchal" that), but the film neither takes a brave stand nor asks any difficult questions. Guadagnino's tacked-on ending suggests that everything is just a matter of perception — one’s "experience," as the kids might say — and all viewpoints are valid. In other words, "After the Hunt" decides to make us comfortable.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com