By Jason Osiason

After the Hunt is refreshingly not your typical #MeToo movie, and it’s far from the misfire people are claiming.

Luca Guadagnino sets this one at Yale, where Julia Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, a philosophy professor on the verge of tenure whose star student Maggie, played by Ayo Edebiri, accuses Alma’s closest colleague and friend Hank, played by Andrew Garfield, of assaulting her after a party. Michael Stuhlbarg hovers at home as Alma’s husband, watching her curdle. On paper that’s a setup we’ve seen versions of before. But Guadagnino isn’t chasing a mystery, and he’s mostly uninterested in the did-he-or-didn’t-he machinery. What he’s actually digging into, somewhat successfully, is what it means to confront trauma versus bury it, and what decades of burial do to a person who has built an entire intellectual fortress on top of the grave.

Roberts is fierce here. This is Alma’s suffocating cage of a movie and Guadagnino directs it that way, with relentless slow zooms that keep creeping in on her face mid-conversation until you feel physically trapped in the room with her, plus a needling, tick-tock score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that turns faculty small talk into a countdown. Her scenes with Garfield really hooked me. There’s a queasy intimacy between two people who have known each other too long, flirtation and loyalty and threat all tangled together, and the two of them play every layer at once.

The writing is where it wobbles. The script is too thinly drawn in exactly the places it can least afford to be, and it flat-out fails the Maggie plot-line. Edebiri is playing the person whose accusation detonates the entire story, and the movie keeps treating her as a device to reveal Alma rather than a character with her own interior life. Every time the film cuts back to her, you can feel a missing draft of the screenplay. For a movie this interested in who gets believed and who gets flattened into a symbol, flattening its own accuser is a real self-own.

And still, there’s plenty to like. The whole thing has an appealingly icy surface, all wine-soaked dinner parties, cigarettes and weaponized politeness, and Guadagnino keeps locating the rot underneath without ever raising his voice. The generational warfare between Alma’s hardened stoicism and Maggie’s fluency in the language of harm is the film’s sharpest material, and it refuses to hand either side a clean win.

A movie about the stories we bury that can’t quite give one of its own characters her story. It shouldn’t work as often as it does, but Roberts makes sure it does. [B]