After the Hunt‘s ending brings its thriller story to a perhaps unexpected conclusion. While the film supposedly revolves around the accusation of Sєxual ᴀssault made by Ayo Edebiri’s Maggie against Andrew Garfield’s Hank, and the impact this has on a complex web of relationships, the final act is far more focused on how Julia Roberts’ Alma is handling the fallout.

The Yale-set, #MeToo drama has pretty much doled out the consequences of Maggie’s claim by the time it’s ready to start wrapping up. After the complaint was made to the university, Hank was fired, and Maggie acquired a larger profile by taking her story to a journalist. An all-hands faculty meeting is called, seemingly to tackle the issue as it garners national attention – but the movie waves past that.

Instead, we see the moments afterward, as Alma’s pursuit of tenure is derailed when she’s caught falsifying a prescription using a colleague’s pad. She has explosive confrontations with both Maggie and Hank, making her the target of the former’s next op-ed, and finally reveals her mysterious past to her husband, Michael Stuhlbarg’s Frederik.

In After the Hunt‘s epilogue, five years later, things look very different. Alma is a dean, suggesting her past controversies have long since faded. She meets up with Maggie, seemingly for the first time since the film’s main events, who begrudgingly declares that Alma “won.” And after holding for a long time on the $20 bill Alma leaves on their restaurant check, Luca Guadagnino can be heard yelling, “Cut!” before the credits roll.

What are we supposed to take away from all that?

Who Is Telling The Truth Doesn’t Really Matter

After the Hunt is uninterested in definitively answering what might seem like the million-dollar question. In fact, the whole concept of truth is something the movie seems pretty suspicious of.

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Maggie fabricated the story. She finds the German article of Alma’s recanted accusation from years ago stashed in the bathroom and does what she does best – plagiarizes it.

Perhaps she sought to drive a wedge between Hank and Alma, whom she had feelings for; perhaps she wanted to take Hank down before his suspicions about her dissertation went any further. It’s undeniable in any case that Maggie shrewdly spins the situation for her own gain.

But how she handles the aftermath doesn’t mean she’s lying. As Hank first tells Alma his side of the story, he’s rightly asked why he went up to Maggie’s apartment in the first place – a line was clearly crossed. How far across the line he went is hardly relevant to whether the university was right to fire him.

Instead of giving us answers, After the Hunt gives us plausibility in either direction. Maggie’s journalistic attack on Alma proves she’s capable of being so calculating and opportunistic; Hank’s physical attack on Alma proves he’s capable of having done what he’s accused of. Neither revelation brings us closer to the truth, by design.

Alma’s Tenure Screw-Up Isn’t A Tangent (& Neither Are Her Classes)

So, if what actually happened doesn’t really matter, what does? Figuring that out requires taking a closer look at Alma’s seemingly unrelated storylines, as well as her lecture topics.

After the Hunt‘s script has a tendency to plant seeds and wait patiently to pay off those ideas. Among the earliest are Alma’s classroom discussions of philosopher Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Modern Prison – first about the public torture and execution the book opens with, and then later the panopticon. Both of these references are critical to understanding what the movie is trying to explore.

In the first instance, Alma can be briefly heard explaining that excessive public executions were used to turn one wrongdoer into an example for others. Putting them on gruesome display was the point. This is one way to understand what happens to Hank, and Alma’s own run-in with Yale’s administration encourages this interpretation.

At first, it might seem like an odd decision that Alma’s own pursuit of tenure comes down to something that is virtually unrelated to the film’s main drama. While the stress of all this surely contributed to her ulcers, forging a prescription for the pain medication is its own bad decision. And when she’s caught, it comes with its own consequence.

Hank is shocked that he’s been outright fired, not suspended, for his transgression; for hers, Alma is neither. Her tenure conversation is paused indefinitely, which, we learn later, really means temporarily. In the road of her career, this incident is little more than a speed bump.

Why such drastically different outcomes? One could argue that Hank’s supposed crime is worse, but Alma’s is still quite alarming, and unlike Maggie’s accusation, Chloë Sevigny’s Kim can prove she is guilty. Should Kim have pressed charges, there’s probably enough evidence to convict her.

But she didn’t – the matter remains private, and it’s handled quietly. The whole student body seems to learn of Hank’s situation almost immediately, and from the school’s perspective, it only gets noisier from there. Not only is the victim the child of a major donor, but she’s chosen to make the matter very public. If Yale is to save face, an example must be made.

Twinned with this idea is the film’s invocation of the panopticon, a building design, most famously for prisons, imagined by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham that’s an important part of Foucault’s book. It arranges floors of cells in a circle around a central tower, from which guards can look into any cell without being seen by the prisoners.

The guards cannot watch every cell at every moment, but because the prisoners cannot see them, they could be watching at any moment. This creates a feeling of constant surveillance, and, theoretically, a constant need for obedience.

It’s not hard to see the line drawn between this conceptual prison and the film’s depiction of cancel culture on college campuses. Except, the pressure applied by this 21st century panopticon isn’t to obey, but to conform, or perhaps to perform. Anyone at any given moment could be observing your behavior and pᴀssing judgment on its acceptability. That, the film suggests, creates a kind of prison.

Cancel Culture: Don’t Hate The Player, Hate The Game

So, After the Hunt is all about having sympathy for the poor older generations, robbed of the freedom to commit cancellable behavior by their Gen Z jailers? Not exactly – neither Hank nor Alma emerge from this film as particularly sympathetic characters, nor does Maggie. The generational screeds in both directions strike me as primarily bluster.

Guadagnino is much more interested in making us aware of what this “pan”-opticon does not see, and in casting doubt on the perceptiveness of observation in the first place.

Critically, we are denied access to what happened in Maggie’s apartment that night, forced to piece the truth together from the conflicting accounts of the only two people who were there and how they chose to behave in the aftermath. At each moment, we are interpreting their words and actions, and weighing them against our standards for guilt or innocence.

But in one important scene, After the Hunt transparently taunts our efforts. Alma goes to the Dean to explain why she shouldn’t be asked to testify in the investigation of Hank, and the moment the two agree their conversation is “off the record,” the movie cuts away from it. The message is simple: We only know what we’re shown, and not everything important happens in public.

But can we even trust what we’re being shown? This is the question provoked by the movie calling attention to its own fictiveness, most decisively through the director yelling “Cut!” over the very last frame. We’re not allowed to leave the theater having suspended our disbelief; we’re forced to remember this is all a performance.

This story has been carefully constructed for us, both in what it reveals and what it hides. Are we experiencing the truth, or merely someone’s truth? And in the real world, when a person is exposed to the court of public opinion, how do we know that person isn’t also performing?

After the Hunt even goes a step further. Alma’s confession to her husband, in her mind, is a revelation of the truth. She wasn’t Sєxually abused by her father’s friend as a teenager; they were in love. She fabricated the abuse claim as revenge after he began a new relationship, and though she later recanted, she still blames herself for his subsequent suicide.

But her husband contends that she didn’t lie; their relationship was abuse. She may feel that she “threw herself at him,” but the responsibility to say no always falls to the adult, and he behaved wrongly. She was too young to perceive the truth, and has held onto that skewed perception rather than reframe it in her adulthood.

This scene pays off two moments from earlier in the film. In the first, Alma asks Frederik, a psychoanalyst, if he ever disagrees with his patients’ understanding of major events in their lives. Perhaps some part of her anticipates this conversation and where it will lead, and hence has withheld it from him their entire marriage.

The second is Alma’s class discussing a reading of a moment in The Odyssey, when the blind bard Demodocus sings of Odysseus’ heroics at Troy, unaware he’s singing to the man himself. Odysseus weeps upon hearing his life reflected back at him, and in the film, this is explained as Odysseus only being able to perceive himself as a hero after hearing his story told by another (sorry, by the Other).

At the core of After the Hunt is neither allegiance to the cancelled nor the cancellers, but a great suspicion of cancellation as a practice. Not only are we not always shown the truth by others, but we cannot always perceive the truth in what we experience ourselves. So how can we presume to pᴀss judgment?