Contains spoilers for “After the Hunt” and discussion of sensitive content, including sexual assault and substance abuse.

Luca Guadagnino is keeping himself busy. After releasing both the tennis love triangle drama “Challengers” and the William Burroughs adaptation “Queer” in 2024, and with a bunch more films on the horizon — including the Sam Altman biopic “Artificial” and a remake of “American Psycho,” though he’s no longer involved in the DC Universe’s “Sgt. Rock” — his #MeToo drama “After the Hunt” is now opening in theaters. Starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, and Andrew Garfield, the movie seeks to push buttons with its “he said, she said” storyline and depiction of intergenerational conflict in academia.

Reviews out of the Venice Film Festival and the New York Film Festival premiere showings have mostly been mixed or outright negative on the film, and its ending — or should that be multiple endings? — plays a major role in the critical response. Various aspects of the conclusion are sure to be controversial, and not all of them for the reasons filmmakers intended. Some have even argued that the film’s final conclusion plays it too safe for a production that makes a big deal out of seeming uncomfortable and confrontational. This article will explain what happens at the end of “After the Hunt,” our interpretations of the questions the movie doesn’t provide direct answers for, and what the cast and crew have to say about that strange epilogue.

Set in 2019, “After the Hunt” follows Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), a Yale philosophy professor seeking tenure, as she navigates the tough situation where her student Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri) accuses another professor, Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assaulting her after a party at Alma’s place. Maggie, who idolizes Alma in ways that border on a sexual obsession, comes to Alma after the incident, vague in her descriptions of how Hank “crossed a line” but clearly distraught by what occurred.

Maggie wants to go public with her story and sue Hank, but Alma believes it better to not make a fuss about it. Hank — who Alma finds more sexually appealing than her husband Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg) — denies the charges against him, and argues that Maggie had a motive to smear him since he caught her plagiarizing. The school shows him the door, and he makes a violent fuss trashing the halls on the way out.

Alma is addicted to various substances, and falsifies prescriptions with papers stolen from the school psychologist Dr. Kim Sayers (Chlöe Sevigny). This gets discovered, killing her chance at tenure. Maggie has her own habit of grabbing papers that she shouldn’t take — the night of the party, she stole a German newspaper clipping about a recanted rape accusation. Maggie interpreted this as Alma having a trauma similar to hers, but Alma is increasingly unsupportive of Maggie — and talking to Rolling Stone, Maggie makes Alma’s unsupportiveness the headline.

After his firing, Hank has been staying in Alma’s backup apartment near Long Wharf, since he still had her spare key — something she’s surprised to realize when she goes to the apartment to be alone. Talking about the case, she agrees that Maggie plagiarized that paper but feared it would look bad to discipline a Black queer student with wealthy parents and media connections. Bringing the subject back to the assault allegations, Alma acknowledges that Hank is flirty and, even if not a rapist, could easily have partaken in relationships with students. Hank angrily denies this and refuses to apologize. He then tries to have sex with Alma … and doesn’t listen when she tells him to stop.

Being confronted by student protesters on campus, Alma faints and is sent to the hospital for an ulcer. While she’s there, she talks with Frederick about the relationship she had as a teenager with one of her dad’s friends in Germany. Alma characterizes the relationship, which began when she was 15, as a “romance” and not grooming or rape. She claims she only charged him because she was jealous of his new, more age-appropriate partner, and later recanted as that newspaper clipping showed. But she feels immense guilt over her accusations playing a role in his later suicide. Frederick assures her it wasn’t her fault — she was a child, and the adult should have known to say no.

The final scene of “After the Hunt” takes place five years later, with news headlines about the California wildfires and Facebook ending DEI programs situating us in 2025. Alma and Maggie meet at a diner, having made amends with each other and both discussing how they’ve matured and are doing well. The last line of the film is director Luca Guadagnino saying “Cut!” off-screen.

“After the Hunt” never directly confirms what happened between Hank and Maggie in the story’s inciting incident, and there are details in the film that might make the viewer question Maggie early on. The way she avoids direct language about the “line” Hank crossed allows for some plausible deniability, and Dr. Sayers’ analysis — that Maggie was telling the truth about feeling violated by Hank, even if the violation was purely about power differentials and not anything violent — could make an easy out for how Maggie’s and Hank’s accounts could both be true in their own ways.

After the sequence in the apartment during the film’s final act, however, it’s hard not to believe the absolute worst about Hank. He can yell all he wants about how he never acted inappropriately with students beyond “flirting” and that the only person at Yale he ever wanted to have sex with was Alma, but that doesn’t change the fact we see him come perilously close to raping Alma. Even if we don’t have definitive evidence of how far he went in his inappropriate interactions with Maggie, the fact that he’s shown a pattern of not taking no for an answer makes it impossible to defend him in the end.

While the accusation Hank makes against Maggie is far less serious than the one she makes against him, it appears that both accusations are true. Alma agrees with Hank that Maggie’s paper on virtue ethics is obviously plagiarized, and without any evidence to the contrary presented, the viewer has no reason not to believe their shared assessment. In “After the Hunt,” everyone is guilty of something — with the possible exception of Frederick, the one likable character in the whole movie.

But should we have to just take Alma’s word on this issue? One of the movie’s big flaws is that Maggie’s characterization as a student isn’t fleshed out nearly enough, so much of our perspective on her is just taken from Alma’s judgments. As one minor example, we’re told by Alma that Maggie has nothing in common with her nonbinary partner Alex (Lio Mehiel) and is only dating them to appear more woke, but we barely actually see what their relationship is like, so it’s hard to say if Alma’s assessment is accurate. Perhaps the scenes of Maggie snooping around and stealing things are meant to imply how she got away with her plagiarism, but for the most part, we’re really only seeing her through Alma’s eyes.

A teenager actively pursues and engages in a sexual relationship with an adult man in Europe, only to feel heartbroken upon discovering that this man has another partner closer to his own age, and a loving figure played by Michael Stuhlbarg gives advice on processing these complicated emotions. This is a description of both Alma’s personal story in “After the Hunt” and the main story of Luca Guadagnino’s Oscar-winning 2017 film “Call Me by Your Name.”

The situations aren’t exactly identical. In the “After the Hunt” backstory, the teenager is a younger girl and the adult man is much older, making it a clear-cut case of grooming and abuse, where “Call Me by Your Name” is in a more ambiguous space that can still be enjoyed as a date night-friendly romantic fantasy. The parallels, however, suggest that Guadagnino has heard the criticisms of the age gap relationship in “Call Me by Your Name” and is looking to address those criticisms here. The hospital conversation in “After the Hunt” shows how trauma from grooming — and the way Alma has come to blame herself for what happened — continues to hurt people decades after it happens. Notably, this whole story is handled very differently in the final film than in Nora Garrett’s original script (more on that later).

Even some critics who’ve come down more positively on “After the Hunt” overall have expressed confusion about what to make of the epilogue. For one thing, the movie already feels long, so adding yet another possible point where the story could end starts to feel like overkill. Then there’s the sudden tonal shift — showing Alma and Maggie fine and on good terms with one another five years after the main story might offer some sense of relief following so much anxiety, but not everyone wants that relief. One of Alma’s most memorable lines is “Not everything is supposed to make you feel comfortable,” so why did this movie need a cushion?

The strongest intellectual defense of the necessity of a five-years-later epilogue (if not of how it was executed) is that the culture “After the Hunt” was commenting on has changed so drastically that one has to acknowledge those changes. Maggie’s comments at the party about how the broader culture is only pretending to suddenly care about the marginalized in the #MeToo era ring extra true amidst the second Trump administration’s assaults on diversity in academia. Yet even the acknowledgement of those changes is just a small part of the epilogue, which largely wants to play more off Roberts’ and Edobiri’s screen chemistry to give them happy ending. Or, at least, the appearance of a happy ending — director Luca Guadagnino has discussed the possibility this ending isn’t as reconciliatory as it appears.

When asked about the ending of “After the Hunt” at the 2025 New York Film Festival press conference, director Luca Guadagnino found the question “difficult” to answer because he wants the audience to make up their mind about it. His response offered a few possibilities about what to make of the epilogue. It could be about “false reconciliation” or “real reconciliation.” After Alma and Maggie spent the movie fighting over truth, Guadagnino offered that, after the passage of time, “they understand what one wanted from the other and the other way around, and what they got and what they lost, but what is always going to be at the center of their lives is capital.”

As for his final line of “Cut!,” the director had a more direct explanation: “Once we say ‘cut,’ we invite the audience to think that this is a movie and we wanted to entertain them.” He noted the ending was an homage to George Cukor’s final film, “Rich and Famous.”

Andrew Garfield compared the final line of “After the Hunt” and Puck’s speech to the audience at the end of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He also brought up how Mark Rylance would end his Shakespeare performances at the Globe Theatre with a dance — “Hamlet’s dead and then he resuscitates and he does a dance at the end, and let the audience go from sobbing with catharsis to going ‘OK, that wasn’t real.'”

The original script for “After the Hunt” has been shared around the internet a lot over the past two years, and it’s striking just how different the script’s ending is compared to the movie. Major character choices have been completely flipped. In this older draft, Alma consents to sex with Hank (then named Henrik) in the apartment, and Henrik admits to lying about having claimed Maggie cheated on her paper. Perhaps the biggest change, however, is that the older draft treats Alma as having actually lied about her assault as opposed to having been a victim of grooming in denial.

While there’s no “five years later” epilogue, the script has its own excessive conclusion, with Alma going to the mother of the man who killed himself over her recanted accusation in hopes of making amends. Even those who loved the script found the ending pointless: ScriptShadow‘s otherwise glowing review states “There is no reason — and I mean NO REASON — for the last 10 pages of this script to exist.” As questionable as parts of the finished film’s ending are, it’s actually better than what it was originally going to be — instead of merely being controversial, it could have been in “worst movie ending of all time” territory.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues or has been a victim of sexual assault, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

• Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN’s National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).