BY ROGER WATSON
Attracted to this film by the fact that Julia Roberts was playing the lead role, my wife and I snuggled down for two hours and eighteen minutes of entertainment. In the end all we got were two hours and eighteen minutes of our lives that we will never get back. Even if we did get them back, we would not relive them watching After the Hunt.
Lest you consider my judgement harsh, or outlying, the film only achieved 37% on Rotten Tomatoes and 38% on the Popcornmeter which usually scores higher than the critics. I consider both those scores to be generous, and I wish I had checked in advance. Yet Rotten Tomatoes still managed to describe the film as ‘A gripping psychological drama’. Gripping it was not. Confusing it was and most definitely soporific.
The plot, if one can be discerned, revolves around an ageing Yale University professor of philosophy, Alma Imhoff (played by Roberts) who becomes involved in an allegation of sexual abuse against one of her younger male colleagues by one of her female students. Imhoff is tripping the light fantastic with said younger colleague while being married to an insufferable psychotherapist husband. I must add that I found him insufferable, it is not clear if Imhoff felt the same way.
The action – a term which may only loosely be applied to the film – opens in the sumptuous Yale apartment occupied by Imhoff and her husband who are entertaining some faculty and senior students. Cinematically, this was an excruciating section of the film. It went on too long, nothing much happened and the conversation was a boring exchange of cod philosophy between students and faculty.
All the usual suspects were named such as Heidegger and Nietzsche to show that the writers had mugged up on their philosophers and there was clearly some tension in the room. Imhoff sat back and lapped it up while helping herself to generously proportioned glasses of red wine. Our Alma has a bit of a drinking problem, it appears, and at various points in the film she is seen gripping her abdomen, bent double by pain. She is frequently seen throwing up in the loo and taking tablets, presumably to ease the pain. We never find out what is wrong with her.
During the party, to provide some relief from the tedium for the viewer, one of the female students heads to the loo. In an incredibly contrived scene, due to the loo roll having run out, she searches in the cupboards and inadvertently finds an envelope with newspaper clippings taped under one of the shelves. The clippings belong to Imhoff. One catches her eye and she keeps it, returning the envelope to where she found it. This same student departs with one of the male faculty.
To satisfy the usual boxes that need to be ticked, the female student is black and a lesbian. The male faculty is white. They are both drunk…what could possibly go wrong? Well, moving swiftly on – which is more than the film did – Imhoff finds the student outside her apartment and the story unfolds that she had invited the male faculty in for a drink when they got back to her apartment. He entered the apartment and, it seems, he entered her against her wishes.
Imhoff vacillates between ‘what were you thinking?’ and agreeing to support her. The student reports Imhoff’s colleague who is immediately dismissed. This alone stretches credulity as no due process seems to have taken place. Perhaps I fell asleep. There is an almighty scene between Imhoff and her, now former, colleague outside a lecture hall in front of the students.
As with many aspects of the film, it is unclear whether Imhoff stabbed her colleague in the back (metaphorically) as they were both up for tenure. It is also unclear why, after he left Yale, the film had to continue. Not exactly enthralling up to that point it then descended into an incomprehensible series of events involving accusations by a group of students against Imhoff as she crosses the campus and a meeting at some remote location with the black female lesbian student where the contents of the stolen clipping are revealed and much shouting takes place. Trying to get away from things for a while Imhoff heads to an apartment she keeps out of town only to find her former male colleague, and lover, at the apartment. She had once given him a key.
She refuses to have sex with him, and he becomes forceful and aggressive before being asked to leave by Imhoff. This may have been intended to confirm her suspicions that he did rape the black female student. The film ends with Imhoff meeting the black student in a diner many years later after the latter has graduated.
Why did they meet and what did they discuss? Incomprehensible is all I can say regarding how the film ended. But I was very thankful that it did.
Roger Watson is a Registered Nurse and Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.