After the Hunt (2025)
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
A college professor finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star pupil levels an accusation against one of her colleagues, and a dark secret from her own past threatens to come to light.
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27 films that influenced After the Hunt
What critics say influenced After the Hunt
People seem to be writing this off as a rudimentary, misguided MeToo/Gen Z takedown, but similarly to Eddington this year, it’s been quite intriguing to see people directing their distaste in a film’s commentary towards the topics that the film is actually most lenient towards.
Ari Aster’s Eddington (2025) remains the most accurate cinematic diagnosis of America’s national nightmare, reaching back to COVID-19 as the primary inflection point.
It’s the third film this year, after “Eddington” and “One Battle After Another,” to take aim at Gen Z’s supposed fragility.
It evokes other recent films, particularly House of Dynamite and Eddington, in wrapping itself in urgency and timeliness to avoid making actual narrative and thematic choices.
The film focuses on neither the abuser's manipulation, like Tár (dir. Todd Field, 2022), nor the survivor's recovery, like Sorry, Baby (dir. Eva Victor, 2025), but rather the disconnect between older and younger generations of feminists rooted in the different survival strategies each generation employs.
If you want to have a tough conversation, Sorry, Baby; May December; and yes, even Tár are movies that have tread similar hunting grounds with much more depth.
It was everything I wanted Todd Field’s TÁR to be, and more.
…who felt like she was desperately trying to make her version of TÁR without any of the dramatic, darkly comedic bite any of that film had.
Diet Lydia Tár muddies the whole film.
A scene of her dressing down a student who dares to weave today’s social issues into a philosophical debate, reminiscent of Cate Blanchett’s ripping a young man a new one during one of her masterclasses, is impressive but lacks the bite that Blanchett could bring to it through Field’s writing.
…there have been a spate of misconduct stories on the big screen, from Kitty Green’s The Assistant to Maria Schrader’s She Said…
Only Maria Schrader’s She Said did, telling the actual story of how the movement began.
The film focuses on neither the abuser's manipulation, like Tár (dir. Todd Field, 2022), nor the survivor's recovery, like Sorry, Baby (dir. Eva Victor, 2025), but rather the disconnect between older and younger generations of feminists rooted in the different survival strategies each generation employs.
If you want to have a tough conversation, Sorry, Baby; May December; and yes, even Tár are movies that have tread similar hunting grounds with much more depth.
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Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia (2025) dives into the tragic calamities of terminally-online conspiratorial thinking and the inhumane avarice of top-1% billionaires.
…recent and upcoming premieres of Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s conspiracy thriller “Bugonia,”…
If we’re going full on “Dynasty” with Alexis and Crystal, the twenty first century edition, complete with a denouement debrief between the two, it needs to commit to the bit.
The scene is reminiscent of Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), which eavesdropped on the late-night conversations of a group of wealthy Manhattanites, pulling the curtain back on a peculiar microcosm of upper-class society.
During the film’s most heated moments, however, Guadagnino will cut to a tight, centrally framed close-up where the actors almost look directly into the lens, à la The Silence Of The Lambs, placing the audience directly within those confrontations.
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In other words, After the Hunt is Oleanna 2.0, a muddier but no less reactionary modern spin on the issues that David Mamet once tackled in his polarizing two-hander about sexual politics and power dynamics on campus. Yet much like Oleanna, there’s a confrontational edge to the material that’s undeniably compelling, like getting sucked into a debate against your better judgment.
…feeling like a full season's worth of Degrassi.