On Screen: “After the Hunt”

After the Hunt

Set on the Yale campus, Luca Guadagnino’s cryptic “After the Hunt” revolves around two professors — married to one another — and a grad student who claims she was sexually assaulted after she is accused of plagiarizing her doctoral dissertation on virtue ethics. That much is clear; the rest is decidedly murky.

Alma (Julia Roberts) is a philosophy professor; her husband Fredrik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a psychotherapist. Both Alma and her close friend and colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) are seeking tenure in Yale’s elite, highly competitive academia.

After a party at Alma’s apartment, Hank walks her favorite Ph.D candidate Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) home. The next day, sobbing Maggie — who is a Black lesbian from a very wealthy family — tells Alma that Hank violated her — which he vehemently denies.

As Alma, who suffers chronic pain, delves into who did what to whom and why, she comes to realize how inexorably her own fate and career is tied to her entitled protégé Maggie’s accusation.

The problem with this prestige ensemble drama, created for adults, lies squarely in the hands of Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name,” “Challengers,” “Queer”), who is known to favor excessive emotional extremes.

With myriad #MeToo references, novice Nora Garrett’s ambiguous script comes close to being incoherent since it’s so self-consciously peppered with dense philosophical allusions like Foucault’s panopticon, Adorno’s “Mihima Moralia” and Giorgio Agamben’s “Homo Sacer,” even grappling with Schrodinger’s cat.

As if to excuse this overly intellectual pretension, along with the relentlessly ticking clock, Guadagnino repeatedly refers to the film’s tagline: “Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable.”

Obviously empowered Julia Roberts embraces shrewd, secretive, opportunistic Alma’s cold aloofness, delivering a remarkably believable performance, manipulatively matched by Ayo Edebiri (“The Bear”).

FYI: Several pivotal scenes supposedly take place at New Haven’s popular Tandoor Diner on Chapel Street and Three Sheets bar on Elm Street — both were recreated on a London soundstage.