"After the Hunt": Incredibly pretentious philosophy professors have problems, with some p*nises and Will Price

Link to the n*de dudes

After the Hunt (2025), on Amazon Prime: A college professor with a dark secret. I'm in academe, and I love movies set in The Halls of Ivy.  Plus it stars Will Price, who I've had a crush on since I saw his gay-subtext role in The Chair Company.   I'm in, even with the two minutes of commercials that Amazon Prime makes you watch before the movie (in addition to the $100 per year fee).

Scene 1: Maggie, a middle-aged black woman, stares forlornly at some African art that shows a man and a woman getting it on. Actually, she's bored stiff at a faculty party while icy cool, incredibly pretentious Alma (Julia Roberts), is lecturing on how there are no universal standards of morality.   Uh-oh, she's going to be a murderer.

Horndog Hank (Andrew Garfield), who is sprawled across the couch with his legs spread, grabs Maggie and says that her dissertation on performative dissent will be the best thing ever written, sure to become a classic in philosophy. But she's only given them a few passages.  "You're too tight.  You need to loosen up."   

This shocks Arthur (Will Price) so much that he drops his drink.

"So, when are you going to defend?" Maggie's elderly mentor (Michael Stuhlberg) asks.  (Defense is where your committee asks biting, unnerving questions about your dissertation and then decides whether to grant your Ph.D. or send you home with four to six years wasted).

"I haven't decided yet."

He chides her for having self-doubts.  This dissertation will make her name as the greatest philosopher of our generation, so why wait?

Hey, Michael Stuhlberg played a 26-year old grad student in "Call Me by Your Name" (2017). Eight years later, he's playing a guy in his 70s?

Maggie has to use the restroom. Incredibly Pretentious Alma says: "Don't use the usual one -- Frederick has a project in there. Use the guest bath at the end of the hall."  I'm guessing that Frederick is her son.

Scene 2: Maggie drifts folornly down the long, scary hallway, finds the bathroom, and slowly shuts the door.  Whoa, horror movie tropes.  Something sinister is waiting for her in there!

Back at the party, Alma and Horndog Hank are grabbing and fondling each other.  Apparently they're married, and going up for tenure at the same time. 

Elderly Mentor tries to talk them out of it:  "I don't want to be a contrarian, but sometimes a wish fulfilled can be more baffling than the longing."

Alma disagrees: "It's not some egoitic teleological pursuit, it's a threshhold."  Professors don't talk like that.

"If you get tenure and I don't, I'll be rageful," Horndog Hank jokes while grabbing and fondling her.  "Well, if you get it, and I don't, I'll be furious."

I'm expecting a scream, as Maggie is eaten by a monster. Or maybe she has offed herself, and the maid discovers her body. Nope, no scream. 

 The problem: No toilet paper.  Looking for some, Maggie finds an envelope taped above the cleaning supplies.  Inside, a handkechief, a photograph, a letter, and a newspaper article.  But someone is coming, so she pockets some and puts the rest back. 

More after the break

Scene 3: Maggie returns to the party, where they're discussing whether we should forgive Nietsche for his Lebensraum propaganda, or Hegel for his "inability to control Little Hegel" (har har). 

Horndog Hank states that Alma is sure to get tenure, because she is a woman, whereas he's a straight, cis white man, highly stigmatized, the victim of constant discrimination and prejudice.  Maggie lashes into him for feeling so victimized, when he belongs to all four of the main oppressor groups.

Amoral Alma, too: "Despite the many professional accolades that I have accrued, I'm going to get tenure solely because I am a woman?"  Yeah, Alma is also straight, white, and cis.  Should those work against her?

Scene 4: Elderly Mentor draws Amoral Alma aside and asks how she is doing. Fine, not much pain.  Uh-oh, she's dying.  

"Hank wasn't hiding his obsession for you very well."  

"You think so?  I thought he was just being polite."  He was grabbing and fondling everything he could find, lady! I'm surprised he didn't take it out.

"Maggie is in love with you, too."

"Just because she's gay?"  Gay character outed at Minute 14.

"No, because you always choose worshippers who are interested in your body as well as your mind.  It's a power/control thing." (Actually, he says it in a far more pretentious way.)

Scene 5: Everybody leaves.  Alma watches Maggie flirting with Horndog Hank on the doorstep, and looks annoyed: she wants her proteges to worship her, not hook up with each other.  Then she goes into the kitchen and collapses in pain; the maid brings her a glass of water.  Wait -- is Alma married to her Elderly Mentor, not Hank?  And he was fine with them doing all that kissy-face stuff in front of him?

Cut to Maggie looking morose in her apartment.  

Scene 6: Morning. This is Yale University!  The campus is not nearly as impressive as Harvard's, but some of the fratboys (left) are hot.

Alma runs into the bathroom and throws up. Cleaning up afterwards takes an extraordinary amount of air time.  She's sick, I get it; let's cut to the mysterious newspaper article!    Then she heads to her class -- packed with students!  This must be for undergrads.

Maggie isn't there (why would someone finishing her dissertation be taking classes?  Maybe she's a teaching assistant?).  Alma texts her with some question marks.

"We were discussing Foucault's expansion on the Panopticon. Everyone observes and punishes each other, so there is no ultimate authority.  Good and evil are a matter of who's watching." She's the murderer.

After class, she checks for Maggie's reply.  Nothing, just Elderly Mentor saying he's making a cassoulet tonight, and Horndog Hank asking her out. "Meet me at the Three Sheets."

Scene 7: It's a bar: They joke, drink, and flirt, and Alma asks "Have you seen Maggie today?  She wasn't in class."   "Nope."  They kiss; he leaves.

Alma hangs around until late at night (what about the cassaoulet?), and comes home to find Maggie there in a fetal position, soaking and upset.  She explains: Last night after the party, Horndog Hank walked her home and invited himself inside for a nightcap.  I thought you hated him for playing the straight white cis male victim.

He got drunk and asked about her partner Alex (played by Lio Mehiel, who is transgender and nonbinary): surely being with someone like them means she's into guys, too?  Then he started kissing her, and went too far.

"What are you saying?" Alma asks. 

"Isn't it obvious?" 

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I thought that, given your history..."

So no murder, no paranormal?  

Turns out that this is a "Me, too" story.  Maggie accuses Hank, but he claims she's retaliating because he has evidence that she plagiarized her dissertation.  Alma gets involved because when she was 15, she accused her father's friend, then recanted (thus the mysterious envelope hidden in the guest bathroom, where anyone looking for toilet paper will find it).

Arthur (Will Price) is not a main character: he appears in only one other scene, in class, when they are discussing Adorno (Alma quotes him in the original German, which of course all graduate students in philosophy can understand): "There is no right life in the wrong world. Obviously this means that it is impossible to act morally."

"Isn't that just nihilism?" Arthur protests. 

"What about Hannah Arendt's Parable of Ulysses?" another student asks: "Ulysses didn't understand the meaning of his journey until someone else told the story."

"So narration by the Other can mitigate the nihilsm and give us a sense of linearity?" Arthur concludes. 

"Nope.  You're immature and regressive,a nd totally missing the fucking point."  In the real world, talking to a student like that would get you fired. Here, it just keeps her from getting tenure.  But not to worry, years later she becomes Dean.

Beefcake: None, but RG Beefcake and Boyfriends has a p*enis photo of Cameron Krogh Stone, who plays an "American college kid," although he's British and 31, and one of the subjects of William Sheldon's physique experiments (he took n*de photos of thousands of Ivy League undergrads to see if muscle caused crime).

Gay Characters: Just Alma and her partner.

Heterosexism:  No romantic relationships, just affairs and assaults.  Alma notes that she and her Elderly Mentor husband aren't intimate.

My Grade: The dialogue is not meant to be hilarious, but I was laughing every time Alma and her Elderly Mentor husband opened their mouths.  It was ludicrously, absurdly pretentious. Nobody talks like that.  And I wanted a plot that was actually interesting, not a dated, superficial "No one believed her" story from the 1990s.  D.

See also:The Chair Company, Episode 1.6: More queer codes at Seth's 18th birthday party. Plus Seth's selfie, a queer puppeteer, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Brock c*ck

"The Eyes of Tammy Faye": A gay-positive light in the homophobic 1980s, with n*de photos, not of the televangelists.  With Andrew Garfield.

"Call Me By Your Name": Or Better Yet, Don't Call Me At All

200,000 photos of n*ked Yale men