139 min | R | October 10, 2025 | Searchlight Pictures
Luca Guadagnino makes a campus thriller about accusations and secrets. Julia Roberts anchors a film that gestures at important themes without committing to difficult truths.
Luca Guadagnino makes films about desire and power and the violence people do to each other in the name of both. After the Hunt attempts to explore cancel culture and institutional complicity. A college professor named Alma faces a crisis when a student accuses her colleague. A secret from Alma’s past threatens to surface. The film sets up moral complexity and then retreats into ambiguity that feels evasive rather than thoughtful.
Julia Roberts plays Alma with intelligence and carefully controlled emotion. She is a woman performing composure while terror mounts beneath. Roberts does strong work inhabiting someone whose entire professional and personal life is built on a lie. Andrew Garfield plays her colleague with wounded defensiveness. Ayo Edebiri plays the student making accusations with conviction that the script never fully supports or contradicts. The performances are not the problem.
Guadagnino shoots the campus environment with cold beauty. Every frame is composed with precision. The film looks expensive and artful. But the visual sophistication cannot mask narrative incoherence. Nora Garrett’s script raises questions about institutional power, gender politics, and the cost of buried trauma. The film refuses to answer any of them or even commit to a perspective. The ending arrives without resolution or insight.
This is a film afraid of its own subject matter. The themes are incendiary. The execution is cautious to the point of paralysis. Guadagnino made Call Me By Your Name and Challengers. He knows how to create tension and explore difficult emotional territory. This one feels compromised. The film wants to be provocative without offending anyone. That is impossible. The result is a beautifully shot thriller that says nothing.