Luca Guadagnino‘s After the Hunt got people talking due to its #MeToo themes and a controversial nod to Woody Allen. Following its premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival on Friday, the reviews have started to come in with mixed thoughts. With 15 reviews in, it stands at 47 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
After the Hunt follows a college professor, Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), who finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star pupil accuses one of her colleagues of sexual assault. In light of the allegation, Alma is faced with a dark secret from her own past that could possibly come to light.
Roberts stars alongside Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny in the psychological thriller, which will hit theaters on Oct. 10. Read on to see what critics are saying about the film.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney wrote that the film asks “interesting questions,” though it makes “a definite choice not to answer them, even in a big-twist epilogue five years later.” Rooney continued, “That might have been an audacious move in a film less strident and more subtle. But the blanket refusal here to throw the audience a bone seems like self-conscious obfuscation.” While Rooney wrote that there are “exciting” aspects of Roberts’ portrayal, he concluded that viewers “deserve more substantial compensation after spending more than two hours with these people.”
In his review for New York magazine, Bilge Ebiri wrote that After the Hunt “is absorbing and well-acted, and Guadagnino ladles on the Ivy League atmosphere.” While Ebiri wrote that the film has “deliberate pacing and talky script, it’s not quite the heady intellectual drama it wants to be. It’s structured more like a mystery; the questions it raises are ones of guilt, innocence, and intent.” Ebiri concluded that the movie mostly “works” because “the cast is uniformly excellent.” He applauded Roberts for giving her character a “stony anxiousness that adds to the frustrations of those around her.” Meanwhile, Ebiri also called Stuhlbarg “a particular standout” as Alma’s “long-suffering husband.”
The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw was less thrilled with After the Hunt and gave the movie two out of five stars. He wrote that the “laboriously nurtured ambiguity and complexity” of the storylines came off as “an evasive and noncommittal jumble of ideas.” However, he did say that the cast did their “considerable best” due to “the unfocused and uncertain characterisation in the material itself.”
One of the more positive reviews came from The Times‘ Kevin Maher, who wrote that the film is “an extraordinary tale of tested loyalties and difficult truths on the campus of Yale University in the early 2020s.” Maher added that “the performances throughout are immense.” He wrote, “Garfield is fabulously louche while always tapping an undercurrent of danger. Edebiri is suitably slippery in a tougher role, one she invests with trademark sympathy despite being rigged occasionally as a boo-hiss villain. And Roberts is simply a powerhouse, propelling the film forward with Alma’s ambition while nonetheless hiding an ominous sickness that manifest with bouts of cramps and vomiting.”
Marshall Shaffer wrote for Decider that Guadagnino may “frustrate some” with the movie’s themes. “But the provocation of foregrounding the discomfort of having to sit with older generational outlooks that will not disappear any time soon feels entirely appropriate given the tenor of the film’s discourse,” he added. Additionally, he praised the cast for possessing “such an awareness of the stakes and narratives that they can abstract the situation to see themselves as players in a grand game.”
For BBC‘s Nicholas Barber, Roberts was the standout of After the Hunt. “Roberts is on screen for almost every one of its 139 minutes, and she is the monumental centre around which its chaos and controversy swirl. It’s the kind of heavyweight role that gets awards nominations if it goes to the right person — and Roberts is definitely the right person,” he wrote. Barber added that it’s “refreshing to see a grown-up Hollywood film that takes on contemporary issues: feminism, cancel culture, identity politics, and the generation gap. But After the Hunt is more of an admirable project than an engaging drama, because it never stops reminding you of how clever it wants to be.”
James Mottram from Radio Times gave After the Hunt two out of five stars. “After the Hunt feels like a muddled film that gets away from him, too often filled with characters mired in academic debates about morals and ethics that will likely go over most viewers’ heads, unless you happen to be a philosophy graduate,” Mottram wrote. However, he did say that Roberts is in “full swing” in the movie. “The actress relishes shouldering such a wannabe watercooler film, and there’s something pleasurable in watching her character gradually lose it,” he said.