Julia Roberts’ MeToo drama old-hat, but compelling

The psychological drama “After the Hunt,” which is having its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival, begins at a Yale University cocktail party.

Windbag academics lounge on a couch, debate philosophy and discuss their dissertations. Booze is binged.  

Yet director Luca Guadagnino’s movie starring Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri can, at times, feel rather late to the party.

It’s a “he said, she said” MeToo story that unfolds on a college campus that’s grappling with the usual culture-war battles over race and pronouns. 

Gen Z’s “triggers” are brought up derisively by Roberts’ Arctic-cold Gen X professor Alma. The script presses hot buttons that have turned warm.

I all but asked, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” to the screen. Centering around a stoic woman who elbowed her way to the top of her field in a world of men in tweed suits, only for it all to be put at risk, the plot has heavy shades of 2022’s “Tar,” which is a much better movie.

A side effect of confronting these issues now, though, is that ripped-from-old-headlines “Hunt” doesn’t make for very challenging viewing. It’s mostly entertaining, and its many mysteries captivate even if they don’t collide into a satisfying finale. 

As guests are leaving the ill-fated fete thrown by Alma and her pretentious and insufferable husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), PHD student Maggie (Edebiri) hops on the elevator with a flirty young professor named Hank (Andrew Garfield) — Alma’s closest colleague.

A day later, Maggie shows up at Alma’s, shaking and soaking wet. She emotionally tells her stone-faced teacher that the night took an ugly turn when Hank wound up back at her apartment for a nightcap. “He crossed a line,” Maggie insists.

Slimy Hank, given complexity by casting good-guy Garfield, angrily says he didn’t.

Wisely, the movie isn’t so much about whether or not Hank raped Maggie, even though that allegation is the inciting incident. Instead, the story dives into Alma’s peculiar role in the scandal as a woman with tenure on the brain who’s looking out for No. 1. Is she protecting Hank? Is she saving herself? What is the secret envelope she hides in her bathroom?

And Maggie isn’t without her own shadowy past. Hank claims she ripped off someone else’s writing, and he discovered the classroom crime right before Alma’s event.    

Here and there, Guadagnino throws in a ticking clock noise, as if a bomb is about to go off. Few big ones do. The countdown that’s reminiscent of an especially artsy episode of “24” adds tension, but the movie nevertheless loses momentum midway through. I became indifferent to its destination.

Our waning interest has nothing to do with Roberts, though. Swapping her radiant glossiness for a rough matte finish, the actress wills the blood to drain from her face as Alma’s life is ripped apart. She’s brittle and removed almost to the point of cruel. Her restraint makes her scattered temper flares terribly exciting. 

And her face-offs with Maggie — oscillating between friendly and ferocious — quicken the pulse. Edebiri does college-age anxiety disconcertingly well, and she is an easy fit into this moneyed cesspool of sweater vests and research libraries.   

One of the duo’s confrontations comes at the end of the movie in a bizarre scene that isn’t so much a talker as a muller. It’s then that we finally understand, kinda, why the movie is hitting theaters in 2025 instead of 2018. 

It speaks, sort of, to the legacy of MeToo, and how the involved parties have fared since.

The hunt is over, and we’re left to wonder who was the predator and who was the prey in Alma, Maggie and Hank’s story. And in the dangerous wilderness of New Haven, maybe everybody’s both.