The following contains spoilers for After the HuntAfter the Hunt almost had a very different ending, with the original idea being a more effective conclusion to the movie. After the Hunt is heavily dependent on an ambiguous tone, with Alma (and the audience) unsure over who is telling the truth amid her student Maggie’s accusations against her friend and colleague, Hank.
This builds to After the Hunt‘s purposefully anticlimactic ending, where no one faces consequences for their actions. It’s also very different from the original ending, which would have retained that ambiguity while giving the central character a full arc and moral decision. The original ending for After the Hunt was really different and a better fit for the movie.
After The Hunt’s Original Ending, Explained
After the Hunt‘s original ending was a bleaker but more fulfilling one, and it would have been fitting for the movie that preceded it. In After the Hunt‘s third act, Alma is left in the hospital after her stomach ulcers perforate while she’s confronted by Alex and other students about the Rolling Stone article condemning her response to Maggie’s accusations.
In the hospital, Alma tells Frederik the story of how she fabricated a Sєxual ᴀssault accusation against an older lover when she was a teenager. Although Frederik argues it was still statutory rape, Alma calls the long-deceased man her great love. The film jumps ahead five years, revealing Alma wrote an article about her experiences that restored her public image.
Now the Dean at Yale, Alma catches up with Maggie and parts on amicable terms. It’s a somewhat ambiguous and bittersweet ending, revealing Alma and Frederik’s marriage survived and Hank found work in politics. Maggie doubts Alma is truly happy in her own life, though, a final ambiguous note to end on. It’s purposefully anticlimactic, fitting for the overall tone.
It’s also not how the story originally ended. During an interview with IndieWire, After the Hunt‘s screenwriter Nora Garrett revealed that the film’s original finale carried on with the more dour tone of Alma’s confession to Frederik. In the initial version of the ending, Alma and Frederik split up, with Alma leaving Yale to return to her native Sweden.
After failing to reunite with the mother of the man she accused of Sєxual ᴀssault, Alma speaks with her parents and is told by her own mother that “No one ever gets over anything.” This prompts Alma to return to America and finally testify in Maggie’s court case against Hank.
This ending would have been inherently more cinematic and would have given the film a clear position on the central conflict of the film. This would have also inherently taken away some of the mystery of the story, even if it remained ambiguous enough for audiences to take away their own conclusions about Maggie’s accusations and Hank’s behavior.
Why After The Hunt’s Original Ending Is Better
After the Hunt is a purposefully dubious in its morality, with no one character ever coming across as fully truthful or genuine in their presentation of themselves. This works for the overall plot about a “he said, she said” situation that quickly escalates, adding to the tension of Alma being torn between her connection with Hank and Maggie.
That ambiguity leaves the ending feeling too disconnected from the overall narrative. With the full arc of Alma’s fall and return to public respect entirely off-screen, the jump from Alma’s confession to her comfortable position at Yale feels unearned. So too does her final talk with Maggie, a pleasant but uncomfortable commentary on the effect of “moving on” from trauma.
It’s an interesting ending, and one that Luca Guadagnino fought for, according to Garrett. It reflects the tendency for people to escape full responsibilities for mistakes in real life, with Maggie’s admission that her hopes for Alma to get her just rewards never really materialized. It’s one of the film’s more stinging condemnations of modern society.
It’s also unsatisfactory as an ending of the story that preceded it. So much of the film is rooted in Alma and the steady reveal of her own complex feelings regarding Maggie, Hank, and the whole situation. The guilt about her former lover shakes the foundations of the character in a way that retroactively makes her more tragic.
Guadagnino argues that a character like Alma would never turn tail and run, but it makes sense from a narrative standpoint. The character reached her lowest point after speaking to Frederik, leaving her open for moral reflection with her mother. This builds to her finally making an overt decision, a rare act for the sake of another and not herself.
It’s a more emotional conclusion to the story, keeping the focus on Alma’s arc and the underlying moral of the story regarding trauma and power structures. It doesn’t deny Alma’s feelings about her first love, but it forces her to fully reckon with them in a way After the Hunt‘s canon ending does not.
Even if the ending doesn’t reveal whether Hank or Maggie was lying, it builds off the clues laid throughout the film about the case and forces Alma to actually make a choice. It’s a more rewarding conclusion as a result, even if it lacks the harsh and mundane touch of reality that Guadagnino clearly wanted to convey in his finale.
After the Hunt has a solid script that feels like it trips over the storytelling to make room for societal criticism. The original ending could have given After the Hunt a clear finale for Alma and the emotional arc of the movie that the final film otherwise lacks.
