The following contains spoilers for After the Hunt.
After the Hunt, the latest film from the director Luca Guadagnino, seems designed to inspire debates about “cancel culture.” Set in 2019 amid the #MeToo movement, the movie follows a group of academics in Yale’s philosophy department who are embroiled in a sexual-assault scandal. The characters are perfectly comfortable discussing morality. But as soon as they’re made to confront their personal beliefs, philosophy becomes, as Guadagnino put it in an interview at the New York Film Festival, something of a “special effect”—the fuel that can turn any conversation incendiary.
The movie, now in theaters, hinges on a provocative event: Maggie (played by The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri) accuses a popular professor, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assault. Hank’s colleague, the enigmatic Alma (Julia Roberts), is subsequently caught between the two—the student who worships her, and one of her cl
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