After The Hunt: A Film That Tries Too Hard
- 3 ene
- 2 Min. de lectura
After The Hunt, starring Julia Roberts (Pretty Woman, 1990), Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spider-Man, 2012), and Ayo Edebiri (The Bear, 2022–2025), is a psychological drama that follows Alma Imhoff (Roberts), a philosophy professor whose career and personal life are shaken when her star student, Maggie (Edebiri), accuses a colleague, Hank (Garfield), of sexual assault. This forces Alma to confront a past trauma and a tangled web of truth, power, and resentment within academia.
The performances are not entirely convincing. Not even Roberts’ stands out at first, as her acting often feels flat or forced, especially in the early scenes. As the story progresses, she becomes more believable and ultimately delivers a performance that works well enough for the film as a whole. Garfield maintains a consistent level throughout, similar to where Roberts lands in the second half. Edebiri, on the other hand, feels overacted or even irritating at times, though that may align with her character’s personality.
The score is occasionally effective but mostly feels out of place. It relies on abrupt musical cues that can be startling, yet the scenes they accompany rarely justify that intensity.
The camera work is odd throughout the film. There seems to be a constant effort to create original compositions, resulting in awkward shots where faces are partially cut off or framed too closely or too far away. The same goes for the transitions introduced in the second half, which feel like a last-minute idea. One scene, where Alma stops her car and suddenly appears walking toward the camera after a cut, feels unintentionally funny and jarring.
There are no changes in the film. You could take a scene from the end and place it at the beginning and ask someone if they noticed any difference, and the answer would be “No.” Something that, in my opinion, is very important in a film. That you can take a frame from the middle of the movie and immediately know which part of the film it belongs to. Poor Things, starring Emma Stone is a really good example of that.
Still, the story is engaging enough to keep you watching, mainly because of the cast and the curiosity of seeing where it all leads.
★★★
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