Nuance For Me, Not For Thee: The Failures of After The Hunt

In 1991, journalist and feminist writer Susan Faludi released the book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, detailing the conservative backlash of the 1980s against feminist victories in the 1970s. Since its publication, Backlash has provided an excellent feminist framework for understanding the push and pull between progress and regression in United States politics. In the age of the second Trump administration, her analysis is particularly relevant.

As the MeToo movement entered into the mainstream in 2017, that backlash seemed to start nearly immediately. Hand-wringing think pieces about ‘MeToo going too far’ popping up as soon as December 2017, just two months after the award-winning reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s numerous sex crimes. While actual consequences for the many powerful men accused of sexual misconduct was largely absent, there did seem to be a small shift in the cultural conversation around sexual assault allegations, albeit briefly and primarily for famous white women. The backlash, unfortunately, gained further steam as the years continued on, from the callous victim-blaming of Megan Thee Stallion after she was shot in the foot by Tory Lanez, to the vicious hate campaign against Amber Heard that was cooked up by a calculating public relations team. The current president was found liable in civil court sexual abuse, and the secretary of defense has been accused of sexual assault as well, with his lawyer claiming extortion “at the height of MeToo” in his denial of the crime. The backlash against MeToo now extends even as far as a potential pardoning of prolific sex trafficker and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, as Trump scrambles to cover up his own decades-long friendship with the billionaire pedophile.

None of this is surprising, though it is harrowing. Meanwhile, throughout the mounting backlash, the film industry, already deeply intertwined with MeToo, has attempted, largely fecklessly, to reckon with the short but hopeful era when it seemed the world was ready to listen to women who have experienced abuse. The problem is, Hollywood, either in self-protection or apathy or total misunderstanding, is largely unable to address MeToo. Faludi’s chapter on film of the 1980s claims that popular American films of the decade aided the backlash to second wave feminism. She was correct then and she is correct now, as the major Hollywood films that have addressed MeToo have only aided the current backlash; Promising Young Woman, Tár, and She Said are not framed around the victim's point of view, putting distance between the audience and those speaking out (or simply killing off those characters altogether). 

After The Hunt (2025), the new film from Luca Guadagnino, written by first time screenwriter Nora Garrett, suffers in part from the same framing problem. The film focuses on a professor, Alma (Julia Roberts), who, in the midst of an emotional affair with another professor, Hank, (Andrew Garfield), is forced to contend with one of her star PhD students, Maggie, (Ayo Edebiri) accusing this professor of sexual assault. The plot incorporates this professor’s own story of being groomed, a wise choice that adds a deeper layer to the story. The problem is, After the Hunt is less concerned with being layered and thoughtful than it is with positioning itself as ‘nuanced’, with Garrett emphasizing “what was very important [when writing the characters] was nuance.” Garrett had noble ambitions in crafting her screenplay, attempting to confront the myth of the perfect victim and prompt the audience to ask “Why am I inclined to believe this person over this person? And why does this evidence challenge that belief, or affirm that belief?” Unfortunately, these good intentions were lost either in the change from script to screen or were lost in the overlong and scattered storytelling that continually falls back on the buzzword of nuance.

In an age of extreme political polarization, and disinformation becoming even more endemic with the proliferation of AI, it’s hard to know what nuance even means anymore. Why are so many pundits and artists so obsessed with finding a middle ground between lies and truth, fascism and compassion? Emphasizing the nuance in sexual misconduct is merely a repackaging of victim blaming,  reinforcing impossible demands for the perfect victim. This is not nuance at all, this is apologia.

Like Guadagnino’s hit throuple sports flick, Challengers (2024), After the Hunt is explicitly set in 2019. In Challengers this felt like a cheeky way to get around having to contend with Covid in a story spanning over a decade. In After the Hunt, this choice of time period feels far less innocuous. The year is deeply relevant to recent conversations about consent and sexual coercion, and the question of why release a film set in 2019 now, in 2025, is answered with an apathetic shrug. At best, it’s lazily avoiding discussing Covid, but in practice, it joins the cultural and political backlash against MeToo.

Another element of the story that is largely not dealt with is race. The accuser is a Black woman, and the accused is a white man. After the Hunt does gesture at these characters’ identities, but in deeply shallow ways. The character of Maggie Resnick, the accuser, is where this comes into blatant focus. In further attempts to inject shallow identity politics and nuance into the dynamics, Maggie is a daughter of billionaires who donate significant funds to Yale, where the story is set. The film uses this bafflingly as a point against her, without actually exploring the intersections of Maggie’s identity and how Black women (including those in higher tax brackets) are treated for coming forward with stories of sexual victimization. It is no coincidence that Megan Thee Stallion was one of the first famous women to experience the MeToo backlash. Nor is it surprising that MeToo, founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke, a Black woman, has become largely associated with a select group of white celebrities, both in terms of victims and perpetrators.

After the Hunt occasionally half-heartedly calls attention to the fact that Maggie is Black (in the original script Maggie was “not of any particular race”), but does not seem to care that racism is integral to how women who come forward are viewed and believed. Her status as a child of billionaires also feels underexplored. Are Maggie’s parents Black as well, or is she adopted? This could have been significant to the story; there are far fewer Black billionaires than white, and to be a Black billionaire and one of the top donors to Yale University is absolutely a position that would come with public scrutiny, which would certainly affect how Maggie’s accusation is viewed. Her class privilege affords her the opportunity to write an op-ed in Rolling Stone about how she was victimized and re-victimized on campus, but that is as far as the film goes. Instead of examining how the intersections of her identity would absolutely be fodder for public backlash, the film becomes the backlash itself.

This film’s squandered potential can also be felt in the infuriatingly condescending tagline for the film: “Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable.” The professors the film focuses on bloviate constantly about the younger generations and how supposedly obsessed they are with being victims. But as soon as the accusation against Hank goes public he immediately wallows in self-pity, the ever so tragic role of the steamrolled white man in politically correct times. Alma too sees herself as a victim, less because the accusation reminds her of being groomed as a teenager by a family friend, but because she is forced to deal with Maggie and Hank both wanting her on their side, as if this is a team sport. There is potent potential here, the irony to be plumbed from Hank’s wallowing could have been darkly funny and even satisfying. But After the Hunt seems oblivious to this interesting paradox of self-victimhood that has fallen right into the film’s lap; it’s frustrating to see this go nowhere, not only because it would be amusing, but also because it would be true. The backlash to MeToo certainly includes the disgraced professors now attempting to claw their way back into power and polite society, many of whom have chapters laying out their tragic woes in The War on Science – a reactionary book of essays released earlier this year where multiple former professors accused of sexual misconduct twist their stories until they look like the innocent victim.

After the Hunt turns away from making any coherent point about self-victimization to instead continue the attack on the younger generations. Maggie’s partner, a non-binary law student, represents the movement at its most clumsily harmful, organizing a small protest that aggressively chants for accountability while surrounding an infirm and distressed Alma. That the only transgender character in the film is depicted as the most sycophantic, the person who supposedly has ‘gone too far’, moves the film from being a backlash solely to MeToo to being part of the wider backlash to progressive politics, going entirely into reactionary territory. Why bother to discuss the ways in which predators use a shrine of victimhood to garner sympathy and whitewash their harmful actions when caricaturing transgender college students is so much easier?

Alma’s own story of victimization, and her refusal to see what happened to her teenage self as anything other than a forbidden romance, is also untapped potential. The fantastic 2023 film May December, and the quietly devastating 2020 novel My Dark Vanessa, both ingeniously explore the rationalization some victims of grooming or sexual violence engage in to live with the trauma. Vanessa, in her mid 30s, struggles to see her fifteen year old self as a girl who was just trying to learn, convinced by her abuser and the culture around her that she was a Lolita-esque temptress with the power to destroy a weak-willed man. Alma views her own story in a similar manner, carrying guilt after the man who abused her died by suicide when she exposed (and eventually recanted) their relationship. But instead of properly exploring this trauma in her past, the film patly waits until the penultimate scene to reveal what happened to Alma and what she thinks of it. How it all may have influenced her strange emotional affair with Hank and her empathy towards him in the aftermath, as well as  her aversion towards the very public testimony of MeToo, due to the circumstances of the of her own abuser’s death, feel like an afterthought. Instead, the film chooses to not study her character much at all, instead leaving us with just a quick, once-over glance. Throughout the film, Alma is suffering from a serious medical emergency that she continually ignores and downplays. Clearly this represents how trauma affects not only the mind but also the body, another aspect of the film that holds potential, but After the Hunt is unwilling to do much of anything with what can actually be nuanced: the perspectives of victims.

For a film sporting a tagline eschewing comfort, the filmmakers don’t seem to realize all they’ve managed to do here is parrot the hegemonic opinion: perhaps both sides are bad, and thus it’s acceptable to look away. What After the Hunt labels as discomforting nuance is only uncomfortable in the way lying is uncomfortable. It is impossible to not wonder what could have been – the kernels of an intriguing story are there, and it is devastatingly frustrating to learn in Nora Garrett’s Marie Claire interview that the “original ending was much more black and white…[with] more of a sense of who did what [and]... a very clear moral arc. Luca was more interested in the ambiguity of what happened that night, extending all the way through to the end of the film." What, exactly, is ambiguous about a professor raping his student? What, in our current culture, is interesting about yet another film voyeuristically asking the audience ‘do you think he really did it? Is she lying?’ These are old, tired questions. Unwittingly or not, After the Hunt is firmly within the backlash.