122 minutes, showing on Prime Video ★★☆☆☆

The story: Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino steers an American philosophy professor, Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), through a sexual assault scandal involving her colleague-lover and her prized student.

Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) claims she was raped after a drunken party, and handsy assistant professor Hank (Andrew Garfield) maintains she is fabricating the vengeful accusation against him because he caught her plagiarising her PhD dissertation.

Both expect Alma to advocate for them.

Set in Yale University in the United States during the 2019 #MeToo movement, After The Hunt is, however, not so straightforward a “he said, she said”, not when Maggie is the black gay daughter of the institution’s millionaire donors smitten with her mentor Alma.

It is a contest between optics and ethics complicated by identity politics, class entitlement and generational differences. Alma is irked by Maggie’s eagerness to publicise the injustice.

With her tenure at stake, she is weighing the correct, rather than truthful, response to the furore.

She is an icy blonde cynic, contemptuous of even her doting therapist husband (Michael Stuhlbarg), and Hollywood star Roberts, at 58 and long past her ingenue winsomeness, is commanding in a trinity of unlikeable self-serving characters.

All the same, the overstuffed culture war drama is too academic to provoke. Never has a movie by Guadagnino, the sensualist behind Call Me By Your Name (2017) and Challengers (2024), been this leached of passion. The moral ambiguities lead nowhere.

The director is trusting the audiences to think for themselves.

That is a privilege rare in cinema these days, except viewers are left thinking only of how much more devastating the Cate Blanchett psychological thriller Tar (2022) was in critiquing woke ideology among the educated elite.