After the Hunt (2025)

A cold, loathsome, conceited & vomit-inducing #MeToo inspired film (mild spoilers) - After the Hunt review by Timmy B

This film will probably be the most disgusting one I watch this year. It is a movie which is filled with loathsome individuals bemoaning how bad their lives are, whilst wallowing & swanning around one of the most elite universities on the planet. Every cliché you could imagine is turned up to a billion, but these have been updated to today's climate, obviously to try to look contemporary & edgy. Whilst it wants to come across as being a trailblazer of the very real battles fought today, instead it simply looks like a desperate loser vocally jumping on every single bandwagon possible to look righteous and on the right side of history.

Alma is a professor at Yale, who lives with her husband Fred. She is well-regarded & liked amongst her colleagues and students, but is also competing for tenure. One night, she hosts a boozy soirée in her flat. In attendance are Hank, a fellow lecturer, provocative letch & close friend of Alma's, who is directly competing against her for tenure; and Maggie, who idolises Alma in every way imaginable. After the party, a drunk Hank walks Maggie home. The following day, an allegation of sexual assault is made against him. The story follows the fallout of the accusations.

To say this film starts badly is an understatement. We are thrust into a world of sanctimonious, smug arseholes, who if you found yourself in the same room as them, would jump out of the window to escape. The writer has made the potentially interesting decision to make the characters all revolting in their own ways, but forgetting that being stuck around these creatures for over 2 hours is on a par with shaving your own eyeballs...

So, we have Hank, who prides himself as being provocative but also a "good dude," who gets more lecherous with every drink. And in the opposite corner, there is Maggie. Maggie is today's representation of everything a certain part of society would fall over themselves to praise to the hills: black, queer, in a relationship with a non-binary person ect. But she is also a deeply mediocre student who comes from eye-watering wealth, parents who have made many donations to Yale, a petulance that makes Veruca Salt look reasonable and repeatedly proclaims her virtues.

The worst example of this behaviour is when Maggie confides in Alma about the assault. Maggie gives vague details of this. When Alma has the temerity to ask "What actually happened?" (like, errr, the police would,) the response she gets is: how dare you question me about anything. Due process doesn't apply to me. To ask anything at all means you don't believe me which means that you are (insert every single woke cliché that comes to mind.) This attitude also conveniently extends to almost any question she is asked.

And this doesn't stop when Hank is immediately fired & hung out to dry (which is in itself outrageous simply from the perspective of having the right to a fair trial.) Despite this, Maggie acts like nothing has been done & she is being ignored, even when Alma publicly embraces her and says she will support her, in a nails-down-a-chalkboard scene complete with screeching music.

And the story just keeps going down this metaphorical cesspool, the virtue signalling becoming so revolting that I turned it off after an hour. To be absolutely crystal clear, in this film EVERYONE is revolting. Maggie's spoilt-brat student is in her own way just as disgusting as Hank's libidinous lecturer; and Alma's snarky professor is equally as rancid as Fred's sanctimonious shrink.

This is a film about a group of horrible horrible people doing horrible horrible things to each other. But for me, the worst thing is that it has used the #MeToo movement, which has been the inspiration for sensational drama before, as an excuse to portray a revolting story as an edgy, contemporary piece of work.

That rumble you can hear isn't justice, it's the next bandwagon which the filmmakers are waiting to jump on...