Key Points
After the Hunt centers on a sexual assault allegation and varying versions of the truth.
Star Andrew Garfield explains why the characters make things worse for themselves.
Director Luca Guadagnino addresses the final scene of the movie and his decision to break the fourth wall.
Warning: The article contains spoilers for After the Hunt.
Did Hank do it, or is Maggie lying?
That’s the question at the center of director Luca Guadagnino‘s After the Hunt when a college grad student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), confides in her philosophy professor, Alma (Julia Roberts), that another professor, Hank (Andrew Garfield), sexually assaulted her after walking her home following a party at Alma and her husband’s home.
Alma is caught in the middle of a situation made more complicated by the fact that she was once involved in a sexual assault claim. As we eventually find out, she lied. She was 15, he was an older family friend, and she was upset after he broke up with her, so she made the allegation. She recanted it years later, but the damage was done and he eventually took his own life. So while she wants to believe Maggie, she’s skeptical, especially because she’s so close with Hank, who she can’t believe would ever do such a thing… until he nearly does the same to her.
Still, we never get an answer about what happened between Maggie and Hank. There are heated confrontations and a slap, and Alma ruins her shot at tenure after stealing a colleague’s prescription pad to get more pain meds. But there’s no police investigation, no trial. That wasn’t the point.
Yannis Drakoulidis/Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
Ayo Edebiri, Julia Roberts, and director Luca Guadagnino on the set of ‘After the Hunt’
“For me, the answer is always in the eyes of the audience,” Guadagnino tells Entertainment Weekly. “How can I let an audience find their own footing on something if I preemptively decide what’s the truth of things?”
Garfield had his own idea of what Hank did. But that’s for him to know and us to never find out. “I won’t say what I decided Hank believed about the events in question. That is better, I think, kept private,” he says, seated alongside Roberts, Edebiri, and Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Roberts’ husband, Frederik.
But Garfield admits that a scene later in the film — which starts as a kiss between Hank and Alma, but ends with him taking things too far and her forcefully pushing him off her after telling him to stop several times — had his wheels spinning. “What’s really very interesting to play, I think for all of us, is where our characters were hiding the truth from ourselves, and where we can’t see our own backside in a way — our asses, as you would say. We’re blind to our own asses. That’s an expression, right?”
“It’s not, actually,” Roberts quickly interjects, following it with one of her infectiously joyful signature laughs.
“I love it. I’m gonna start using it,” Stuhlbarg says. Edebiri agrees: “It honestly might endure.”
Garfield attempts to explain. “My friend used it last night,” he says, “and she was like, ‘Yeah, all these characters, they just can’t see their own asses.'”
“Who can see their ass?” Roberts wonders, before adding, “This is the headline: ‘Blind to their own asses.'”
Joking aside, perhaps in the moment they can’t, but with hindsight maybe it’s easier. For its final scene, the movie makes a five-year time jump. Alma, now a university dean, is sitting in a diner, where Maggie joins her for a short conversation. Alma has gone public with her story; Maggie wonders if it was all for sympathy. And as much as it seemed she used to be exactly like Alma, now she says she never could be.
Says Guadagnino of his vision for the moment: “I think after the screams and the cries are settled, and time kind of heals the wounds, and the blanket of snow puts everything to rest, after the hunt, what remains of this scenario of ruins — of moral ruins — that these people have been creating between one another, and particularly these two women? At the end, for me, it’s like, is there playfulness? Is this a conversation of reconciliation, or is this a new way of mannerism? Is this a new way of acting again, a different self, so that they are still into the hunt?”
Amazon MGM Studios
Ayo Edebiri and Julia Roberts in ‘After the Hunt’
And just after leaving us with those thoughts, the director adds one more layer. For the final shot, the camera lingers as Alma pays her check with a $20 bill… and then, the fourth wall breaks as we hear Guadagnino call “cut” off camera.
The moment wasn’t part of the script but, rather, something he thought about “two, three weeks before wrapping.” His inspiration: Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Falstaff, based on Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor and scenes from Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2.
“At the end of this opera, all the characters go in one big line on stage, and they say, ‘Everything in the world is comedy,'” Guadagnino explains. “I love the idea of this fourth wall collapsing, and basically I tell the audience, ‘This is our story. We said it this way. Make up your mind.'”
After the Hunt is in theaters now.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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