Inside “After the Hunt,” the most provocative film of 2025

Following the premiere of “After the Hunt” at the 82nd annual Venice Film Festival last August, journalist Federica Polidoro sat for a junket interview with the film’s stars, Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield. The film, about a reported sexual assault on an Ivy League campus and the fallout that occurs between two professors, Alma (Roberts) and Hank (Garfield) and their young protege (Edbiri), is practically Byzantine. Naturally, journalists were eager to make sense of it. During their conversation, Polidoro attempted to parse the film’s intricate themes of social justice, accountability, sexual assault, power grabs, campus politics and women’s rights. “Now that the MeToo era and Black Lives Matter are done, what do we have to expect in Hollywood, and [what did we lose] with t