If the common spectatorconditioned by the digital contamination of superheroes and the like (see the mechanization of an actor as talented as Jared Leto in the recent Tron: Ares), There still remains some taste for the human truth of the actors, After the Hunt has something genuine to offer you. Let us remember the illuminating parallel with Guadagnino’s previous achievement, Queer (2024), brilliant adaptation of the novel by William S. Burroughs, with Daniel Craig.
The cast brought together by Guadagnino is distinguished by its infinite expressive nuances, sIt is inevitable to highlight the performance of Julia Roberts, long freed from the legacy of Pretty Woman (1990), here exposing the most secret disturbance of a woman challenged to face the weaknesses of the very truth she constructed. Without forgetting the always subtle, almost discreet, Michael Stuhlbarg in the role of Frederik, Alma’s husband.
Cinema & theatre
Given the richness of the dialogues of After the Huntthere will be a very old form of cultural stupidity capable of attacking this type of film for what would be its “theatrical” dimension (as if the theater itself were exhausted in the words spoken by the actors…). In truth, Guadagnino returns to us the forgotten wonders of a cinema (Frank Capra, Eric Rohmer, Woody Allen, etc.) in which the word is treated as a nuclear material in the organization of the world.
What we find in the prodigious dialogues of Nora Garrett’s screenplay (a “mandatory” nomination for the Oscars!) is the effective power, sometimes transparent, sometimes ambiguous, of the word as a living “thing” of all human exchanges.from the most institutional to the most intimate. In this time of many idle discussions about the “truth” of facts, After the Hunt leads us to rediscover these exchanges like a stage without a fourth wall: there we play, moment by moment, word by word, what we are and what we imagine ourselves to be.