After the Hunt review – Julia Roberts faces a dilemma in Guadagnino’s muddled campus accusation drama

Venice film festival
Luca Guadagnino’s latest – also starring Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield – is clenched in its own sense of relevance, as a desire to find complexity in a scandal at Yale becomes a noncommittal jumble of ideas

Luca Guadagnino misfires with this bafflingly overlong, overwrought #MeToo campus accusation drama from screenwriter Nora Garrett, broadly in the tradition of David Mamet’s Oleanna or Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things. It is worryingly muddled and contrived, perhaps in need of further script drafts to excavate a clearer and more satisfying drama inside.

Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri star, with Andrew Garfield and Michael Stuhlbarg in supporting roles; they are all doing their considerable best, each frankly hampered by the unfocused and uncertain characterisation in the material itself, which, by the time it finally reaches its coda-finale of confrontation, is almost bizarrely inert, anticlimactic and incoherent. The movie is clenched with its own sense of contemporary relevance and risky blurred lines, saddled with an almost deafening score that often grinds straight through the dialogue; the drama becomes an atonal quartet of self-consciousness. One particularly weird and unearned mannerism is periodically introducing a pointlessly loud timebomb-style ticking on the soundtrack, something brought out in lieu of actual suspense but which never leads to anything as clear or interesting as an explosion.