After the Hunt stars Julia Roberts. The film, directed by Luca Guadagnino, is an uncomfortable journey from start to finish. Julia Roberts stars as Alma, a philosophy professor at Yale.

After the Hunt begins with a cocktail party at Alma’s home. She’s engaged in a highfalutin, overly intellectual discussion with her guests, including Hank (Andrew Garfield). Her husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) looks on from the sidelines with a bemused expression.

The pretentious conversation reveals that both Alma and Hank are up for tenure and rivals for a single tenure position.

The party includes students, particularly Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). Hank walks Maggie home after the party ends. What happens next depends on who you believe.

It seems Maggie adores Alma. Alma does not deal with the adoration well. She’s often cruel and insufferable with students, and Maggie needs special treatment after the party.

There’s a lot of talk about how much the professors hate their rich, privileged, entitled students. There’s a lot of talk about mistakes and unforgivable actions. Alma may lecture on ethics, but she doesn’t put her knowledge to use. She promotes herself as a feminist leader of women, but when it comes down to the wire she doesn’t always perform as one.

We learn of affairs and rapes and backstabbing, but we never get a really complete story. As an audience we struggle with incomplete knowledge. The nerve-racking soundtrack helps keep you off balance.

Every crisis in the film is unresolved when the film advances five years to a brief coda. Maggie speaks the last line to Alma, “You won.”

But what did Alma win? She lived through a health problem. Was that the win? She still has a job, but did she get tenure? She’s still married to Frederik. She survived Hank. Was that the win? Maggie seems to have made it through Yale successfully, so was that the win?

Dr. Sayers (Chloë Sevigny) has a very small part as one of Alma’s professor friends. Maggie’s partner Alex (Lío Mehiel) has a small role as Maggie’s protector when Alma doesn’t give her the help she wants.

Since you’re still reading, you’ve realized by now that I didn’t like any of these characters. But the film was compelling anyway. In the same way some people like to watch reality shows so they can laugh at the stupidity, watching this film is an invitation to ridicule the pretentious. Aren’t they awful, ha ha ha.

Yet they turn out to be the same imperfect, guilt ridden, ambitious, secretive humans as everyone else. They just have a bigger vocabulary and live in nice houses. They can wear white trousers after Labor Day and look fab.

This film certainly isn’t for everyone, but if you’re interested, it’s streaming on Prime Video.