Over the past several years, director Luca Guadagnino has developed a reputation for erotic dramas with tantalizing interpersonal conflicts fraught with sexual tension (see our review for his movie “Challengers”). “After the Hunt,” unhappily, is not that. This academic drama about the he-said-she-said nature of a campus assault allegation is dull, tedious, messy, and at times even regressive in its politics. “After the Hunt” is a slog that wastes the talents of its stars on unlikeable characters in befuddling situations, rarely coming near a coherent plot point with any degree of competence.

Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts) is living the life that most pretentious academic intellectuals dream about. She’s a philosophy professor at Yale with tenure so close she can practically taste it; a doting husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) who does all the heavy-lifting in their relationship; a flirty situationship with Hank (Andrew Garfield), her closest work colleague; and a graduate student, Maggie, (Ayo Edebiri) who worships the ground she walks on. But everything comes tumbling down when a distraught Maggie comes to her to report that she was sexually assaulted by Hank — her lover and coincidentally her biggest competition for tenure — when he walked her home from a party the previous night. This revelation unleashes a firestorm on campus, to say nothing of the long-hidden secrets in Alma’s past that it forces her to confront.

Characters in a psychological thriller don’t necessarily need to be likable, but honestly one of the biggest problems in “After the Hunt” is that it struggles to find a character who isn’t repugnant. Most of the people in this film are not only contemptible most of the time, but their actions and motivations are utterly incomprehensible. The only actors who breathe life into the production, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny, are shockingly underutilized. There’s a shot early on in the film where they’re sitting on a couch having a quiet, normal conversation while Alma and Hank are holding court at a party, and it’s hard not to wish that they were the characters we were following throughout the proceedings. Instead, we’re left at the mercy of a profoundly uninteresting web of intrigue.

As our entry point into this chaos, Alma operates as the person around whom everyone else revolves, both in reality and her own eyes. Her husband dotes upon her, despite the fact that she seems to regard him with fondness rather than love, and certainly not passion. Hank sees her as not just an affair partner for sex, but a captivating intellectual equal in her own right. And Maggie — well, her relationship with Alma is one of the most complex of all. Alma claims that Maggie is in love with her, and it’s not hard to see her point: Throughout much of the film, Maggie hangs on her every word and even begins dressing like her mentor. It wouldn’t be a Luca Guadagnino film without a little bit of psychosexual drama, although this one in particular seems underbaked.

There’s no denying that “After the Hunt” thinks it’s much smarter than it is. The sexual politics, commentary on the Me Too movement, and criticisms of the younger generation’s unwillingness to deal with anything that makes them feel uncomfy might have approached relevancy if this had been made 10 years ago. Instead, they come across as dated and unengaging from a viewer’s perspective, having listened to exactly these arguments be hashed out ad nauseam for years.

There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about a story that deals with the blurred lines that can exist between young faculty and graduate students, and “After the Hunt” doesn’t even bother to try to give it any sort of flair. None of the characters seem to make much sense, and the more that’s revealed about them, the less we care. There’s a laziness to both the characters and their relationship dynamics with one another, as though Luca Guadagnino thought that “After the Hunt” would be able to float by on the strength of its performances. And while Julia Roberts plays the prototypical career academic with aplomb, Andrew Garfield brings a weaponized likability to the table that makes the he-said-she-said arc carry any water, and Ayo Edebiri makes the best of an enigmatic, underdeveloped protege figure, none of these performances overcome the very real shortcomings of the script.

So all things considered, it’s difficult to regard “After the Hunt” as anything other than a disappointment and a waste of talent. Whether it’s the result of a script that needed a few more passes before being ready to actually be filmed, or Guadagnino just going through the motions, we can’t say. But Guadagnino’s output has been fast and furious over the past few years — maybe this is a case of an indisputably talented director with a gifted cast who simply needs to slow down and show his work?

“After the Hunt” made its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 26, and hits theaters on October 10.