Luca Guadagnino’s button-pushing potboiler After the Hunt is all smoke and no fire. It raises tons of questions, offers no answers, and then sits back in the smug assurance that simply raising difficult issues is a victory of great moral and artistic virtue. As someone who has long quoted Spike Lee’s insistence at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival that “It isn’t the job of movie makers to offer solutions. All we can do is present the problems,” it would seem that I would be in strong support of After the Hunt’s provocations and ambiguities. And, in theory, I am. But, the problem is that the film is direly unpleasant because all of the characters are unpleasant. Roger Ebert famously called Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) a “call to empathy.” After the Hunt is a call to derision.

The films opens with a title card announcing “It happened at Yale,” which would seem to suggest that what follows is based on a true story. It isn’t, at least not any particular true story and certainly not one that took place at Yale. Yet, Yale is very definitely the primary setting, and Guadagnino appears to have swallowed hook, line, and sinker the myth that no actual work ever takes place at Ivy League universities. Rather, the entirety of the professorate spends the majority of their time in swanky, magazine-ready penthouse apartments drinking, smoking, and casually using words like “egoism” and referencing Kierkegaard and Foucault in everyday conversation. When they show up for class, they are derisive, pompous, and condescending. It is as if Guadagnino ordered up a bad parody of the worst stereotypes of academia lushly photographed like a Bernardo Bertolucci chamber drama. Of course, the professorate is also a hotbed of interpersonal misery, competition, emotional hangups, addictions, and sexual misbehavior, the latter of which becomes the “what really happened?” lynchpin of the narrative.

The main character is a Yale philosophy professor named Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) who is on the cusp of achieving tenure. Alma is cool to the point of being glacial, and even though her passive-aggressive psychologist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) politely suggests that she is merely “aloof” rather than “cold,” the latter adjective is much more apt. Alma’s best friend is a younger philosophy professor named Hank (Andrew Garfield) who is much more gregarious and outspoken, and the manner in which they interact suggests that they either had some kind of romantic connection in the past or are on the cusp of igniting one (or both). But, that is not the wrench in the ivy-cloistered works. Rather, it is what happened (or didn’t happen) when Hank accompanied one of Alma’s graduate students, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), back to her apartment after a ritzy soiree at Alma and Frederik’s townhouse. If Maggie is to be believed, Hank asked to come up to her apartment for a nightcap and then sexually assaulted her. If Hank is to be believed, he asked to come up to her apartment for a nightcap and nothing else happened.

This, of course, traps Alma in the middle of a particularly prickly situation. As Hank’s friend, she is supposed to take his side. As a woman, she is supposed to take Maggie’s side (oh, and did I mention the story takes place in 2019, the height of the #MeToo movement, although that phrase is never uttered?). There are even more complications, though, as Maggie found (in a laughably ridiculous plot convenience) a secret envelope taped inside the cabinet of Alma’s bathroom that promises some kind of secret from her past that is sure to be revealed in the third act. And Maggie is a black lesbian living with a trans-man (Lio Mehiel) and is also a trust-fund baby who very well may be an absolutely mediocre graduate student who possibly plagiarized her dissertation (if Hank is to be believed). All of these competing recriminations don’t add up to a Rashomon-style deconstruction of the elusive nature of truth, but rather a sordid stew of politically charged she-said-he-said-she-said monotony that grows increasingly insufferable once you realize that every single character is pretty much an awful person. Even Frederik, who might at first blush seem to be a wearied, but determined husband, is revealed to be a sad pervert who falls asleep at night watching Internet porn, an activity that Alma seems to care about not in the least.

One can certainly say good things about the performances, particularly Julia Roberts’s and Andrew Garfield’s. Roberts puts her star persona on the line playing a deeply dislikable and selfish character who spends so much time inside herself that she is largely incapable of connecting with other people outside of direct confrontation (of course, she did the same thing in Mike Nichols’s Closer back in 2004, which was an even worse experience). The film’s idea of generating sympathy for Alma (beyond casting Roberts) is afflicting her with some kind of gastrointestinal pain that plagues her at particularly tense moments, thus conflating emotional outbursts with physical suffering. Garfield is coiled and energetic within the confines of a limited character defined primarily by his flirtiness and then anger. Everyone is both right and wrong because everyone could be both innocent and guilty, which is part of the primary charge of first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett’s script. Garrett has a good sense of how to barb words for maximum hurt, but not of realistic dialogue, which the material sorely needs. Every exchange feels hyper-scripted and false, which bleeds the drama of its urgency. It also doesn’t help that Garrett seems to know next to nothing about academia and how the scholarly world works, which turns her characters into even thinner stereotypes than they initially seem and the world they inhabit into a cartoon landscape that the Trump Administration could use as evidence in their next attack on higher education.

In the end, you will be left asking what it was all about, especially when the film coyly leaps forward five years to a brief epilogue that finds the main characters in surprising and unlikely circumstances. I imagine that the filmmakers congratulated themselves on having the courage to refuse to answer any of the film’s major questions, as if lobbing such softball provocations at a mainstream audience is some kind of achievement. Much has been made of the fact that Guadagnino rather self-consciously chose to use the Windsor typeface against a black screen in the film’s credits, given that this font has been the province of Woody Allen films since the mid-1970s—some 50 films in total, which all but makes it fundamentally his. Guadagnino’s answers in various interviews as to why he chose this font have pointed directly to the influence of Allen’s body of work, particularly in the 1980s and early ’90s, which is admirable, but also immensely misguided. To so self-conscious evoke Allen in this manner feels more like exploitation than acknowledgement, especially given how far Guadagnino’s film falls short of Allen’s best work.

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