In "After the Hunt," the Only Thing Left of #MeToo is the Fear of Being Perceived to be On the Wrong Side

a trap for Letterboxd reviewers so effective I wonder if that was the intent

people want movies to be exactly this didactic

After the Hunt, the new film by Luca Guadagnino, has a lot of the characteristics we’ve come to expect from its director - the movie is elegant, messy, and of particular interest to me today, destined to be relentlessly overinterpreted. Starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri, the film follows a Yale philosophy professor (Roberts) whose career and personal life spiral after a former student (Edebiri) accuses a friend and rival on the faculty (Garfield) of sexual assault, which forces her department into a frenzy of moral panic and self-preservation. It’s already inspired a torrent of commentary from critics and audience members, who seem convinced that the movie is trying to say something profound about #MeToo, when its entire point is that no one in it - or watching it - has anything meaningful left to say at all.

Letterboxd is, as I’ve said before, an artifact of everything annoying about the internet: it’s a forum where a lot of sharp people say interesting things about movies, interesting things which are immediately drowned out by the torrents of one-liners from adult children who are desperate for attention and seem to believe that if they ever stop performing for their peers, they will cease to exist. After the Hunt is one of those rare movies that shakes the network out of its addiction to Twitter “humor,” and yet the result is no better; it’s a movie seemingly designed to provoke a particular panicky, bad-faith interpretation in precisely the kind of person who has a Letterboxd account.

Many Letterboxd reviews treat After the Hunt as though it’s a commentary on #MeToo, and many savage the film for not being the kind of serious, moralizing #MeToo drama they’d expect. They want to be able to break down the story into the most obvious and didactic themes and issues possible - here’s the commentary on power, here’s the take on consent, here’s the biting references to so-called cancel culture, etc. And, because the movie clearly is not a simplistic empowerment tale where #MeToo is represented as a righteous force, many commentators are trying to graft an anti-#MeToo message onto the movie where no such message exists. That is to say, because they can’t find a morally uncomplicated parable about a young woman being preyed upon by a more powerful man - and the movie’s willingness to depict Adebiri’s accuser character unsympathetically is genuinely surprising - then, they assume, Guadagnino must be indicting #MeToo. Those are the only options! If it’s not a pro-#MeToo liberal weeper, it must be an anti-#MeToo reactionary troll job. Such is the moral binarism of the childlike mind.

In fact, the movie’s true ambition is far darker and more satirical: it’s a biting gonzo comedy of manners about how those who claim to live in the realm of ideas betray those ideas when they matter most. Everyone wants it to say something, but its entire point is that, in this milieu, nothing really stands for much. Set in Yale’s philosophy department - a temple of ideals, ethics, values, and high-minded discourse - the film gives us Alma (Roberts), Hank (Garfield), and Maggie (Edebiri), surrounded by colleagues and students whose language is always dripping in moral vocabulary. Yet when the crisis arrives, when an accusation fractures reputations, what becomes clear is that none of them have any convictions beyond preserving their own interest, protecting their standing, minimizing risk. If this feels like a betrayal, that’s because it is, not so much a betrayal of ideals but a betrayal of the assumption that we should have ideals when it comes to topics like sexual assault. The satire lies in the contrast: they’re educated, credentialed moralists in theory, but in practice they shrink from the only stakes that count. They perform virtue, posture for optics, align with whichever side seems least likely to cost them. The movie, in effect, holds up a mirror to critics and thinkers who assume that those with moral language must have moral backbone.

That’s the whole movie, and honestly I think it’s Guadagnino’s most obvious and explicit film yet, the one where his playfulness has the most explicit and unambiguous point. This is, I would wager, the movie’s biggest flaw, but it’s also really funny to see the film commentary class failing to recognize the point because they’re so afraid of being perceived to have the wrong politics on #MeToo… the exact fear that the movie satirizes so effectively. Like the Yale academics wheeling and dealing to avoid blame, the Letterboxd reviews of After the Hunt treat sexual misconduct as potential landmine to be avoided rather than as a morality-laden challenge to be addressed.

• Says user “noen,” “The whole film presents itself as a weighty declaration”; I can’t think of a film less interested in making weighty declarations about serious themes than After the Hunt.

• Professional movie reviewer Robert Daniels writes, “It so thinks it’s a great, conversation-pushing work”; it most certainly does not, and indeed, its lack of such pretensions is its most obvious point.

• User raywu says the film belongs among “hard to watch, self-indulging films criticizing all sides of culture while believing itself to be all-seeing,” which is just about the opposite of the film’s perspective.

• Cody Dericks refers to the film’s “exploration of privilege, power, identity, and the blurred line between truth and fiction”; such an exploration is precisely what the film does not provide, what it mocks its characters for failing to undertake.

On and on and on.

Letterboxd reviews and think-pieces are full of people leaping for thematic redemption, hunting for the message, clutching at what the film means about MeToo, about cancel culture, about power, as if it were their intellectual duty. But that impulse misses the point: the film is about the bankruptcy of meaning in precisely those contexts. It doesn’t need to deliver a moral statement, because the characters don’t operate in a moral universe; they operate in a universe of fear. They’re terrified of being accused, terrified of reacting the wrong way to an accusation, terrified of not following the correct protocol. So they hedge, equivocate, betray, retreat. The movie’s drama is not its ideas but its failure of ideas. To expect it to mean something is to misread its methodology: it’s a performative satire of the liberal intellectual class that would reduce every work of art into another bullet point in their moral resumé.

What this says about the death of #MeToo as intellectual movement is stark. The original righteous impulse to call out abuse, to use public condemnation and the media in an attempt to hold predators accountable, was obviously morally necessary, and that necessity endures. But the surprising power the movement amassed ended up being its undoing; once that power became plain, the reaction to it ceased to be moral and instead became tactical and self-defensive - that is to say, people stopped having an ethical relationship to #MeToo and began to develop strategic contingency plans about it. That’s what the movie is dramatizing; these people who live in ideas and ideals and ethical reasoning are reduced immediately to pursuing their own naked self-interest by an accusation. By turning #MeToo into an ogre, by reveling in its capacity to induce fear in men, its own proponents hollowed it out. They created a zone in which nobody could think or speak with nuance, because everyone had to be a fortress of moral correctness or else were guilty by default. By making the movement untouchable, advocates ironically defanged it: the fear #MeToo generated turned potential defenders into timid bureaucrats, unwilling to argue with complexity for fear of being burned. This is not an indictment of the movement itself, and it’s fair to ask if there was any other likely outcomes for a movement that had to take people down to function. But that’s what happened - the fear ate the morality.

You can see that all over the Letterboxd reviews, a sweaty anxiety over not appearing to fall on the wrong side of #MeToo. In broader liberal intellectualism, this phenomenon is now the default mode: the fear of appearing wrong on issues of social relevance has outgrown the desire to be right about those issues. Even in the aftermath of the “vibe shift,” here in the post-woke world, contemporary American liberalism is dominated not by ideas but by anxiety. It’s still a movement of people who were forged in the fires of Yelling Social Justice Twitter, filled with adherents who grew up in moral terror of being on the wrong end of a pile-on. This ongoing status of perpetual worry leaves us with a liberalism defined by timidity. No one wants to commit to a particular stance about any controversial subject - that is to say, a subject where the “correct” point of view has not yet been made abundantly clear - because whatever you commit to today can be weaponized tomorrow. So they hedge, they cave, they triangulate, they tweet cagey disclaimers. They treat every cultural product as a potential landmine. And thus liberalism becomes a sclerotic, anxious non-movement without a capacity to shape its own convictions or boundaries.

That’s why After the Hunt matters, even if many critics don’t grasp the point due to their own fear. It isn’t a sermon, and it’s not a plea. It’s a grotesque comedy about how people who believe in the rhetoric of righteousness collapse into selfishness at the smallest pressure; it’s a depiction of philosophers who have no philosophy about anything other than how to protect their status. That’s the pitch: watch the people who talk about ethics the loudest when nothing is asked of them, then see how small they become when stakes are real. The film doesn’t fail as a work of art because it doesn’t seem meaningful, as it’s accused of in reviews; it succeeds by refusing meaning, by dramatizing the emptiness left behind when moral language is decoupled from moral will.

So when you scroll through Letterboxd and see dozens of reviews complaining that After the Hunt is making a contrarian argument about #MeToo or thinks it’s making a bold statement about #MeToo or is “an old white man’s complaint about cancel culture,” know that they’ve already missed the joke, and further, know that the joke is on them. They can’t see what this movie is more or less explicitly doing because they believe every movie must do something in a deeper sense, in a way that fits within the narrow boundaries of their aesthetic politics. They think a movie that takes such an accusation as its narrative subject matter must be taking a stance, pro or con, on #MeToo. They’re so disciplined in reading meaning into everything that they fail to see that sometimes a film’s ambition is exactly not to deliver a meaning, but to expose the rot in the machinery of meaning-making itself. On the contrary, this movie is pointing out just how denuded of real meaning this topic has become; beliefs about #MeToo, Guadagnino appears to be saying, have become irrelevant in the face of selfish posturing around #MeToo.

In that sense, After the Hunt is one of the rare films that understands how modern liberal intellectualism really works - not as a set of ideals people defend, but as a protective shell people hide in. And in doing so it holds up a mirror to everyone who thinks they can treat every cultural moment as a moral battlefield. In that sense the movie functions as a truly devious trap for Letterboxd users, who as a species cannot think of movies in any other terms than getting it and in so doing being protected from the accusation of not getting it. That they’re obviously not getting it here is just one of those things. The problem is that they’re locked in a permanent competition to be the most clever, mistaking shitty jokes for insight and irony for interpretation. They don’t actually watch movies so much as forage through them for tweet-length evidence of their wit. Every frame is a prompt, every performance a chance to flex their cultural literacy, every line of dialogue a potential caption for their self-branding exercise. They call this criticism, but it’s really résumé-padding for the Extremely Online, a mass competition to see who can be the first to turn a piece of art into a performance of their own discernment. It’s not just that they misread this particular film and in doing so exposed themselves; it’s that they no longer know how to comment on any movies in any way other than as an excuse to talk about themselves.

(ps please like my own objectively correct Letterboxd review in order to push it up the leaderboard and serve as a protest against all the dumb ones)