After the Hunt (2025)

Oh, my, do I see why this got under folks’ skin. Luca won’t just give the audience exactness, the total truth because most of us will never see what happens behind that door where these two characters were, unless real evidence can truly specify real details, what is left is behaviors and pokes at us with a stick to see how our own beliefs and way of seeing things will decide with certainty if Maggie acted out of desperation to get Hank fired so her plagiarism (or did she?) would remain secret or if Hank used plagiarism as a weapon to escape sexual assault allegations. Is Maggie even using Alma’s past as a weapon against Hank so she can remain protected from some perceived discovery of “being a mediocre student given clearance to be in a major professor’s orbit due to rich parents”. Or is Hank exactly as Maggie said: he continued on her after she said no, assaulting her in the process, very much deserved of his fate, despite how hard he worked to get to where he was (no trust fund or easy path of success). It would be so much easier for an audience to be able to see the guilty party, no ambiguity at all, just he did it or she lied about it to protect herself.

There was a lot of talk about the budget, particularly what was paid to Julia Roberts. She definitely earned that paycheck but that really hurt the film because it was so expensive to produce and failed to recoup it in theaters.