It’s happening again. The Motion Picture Academy is holding a ceremony to honor its contributions to the global imagination. Competing for the main prize will be Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (with a record sixteen nominations) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. The first is a vampire period piece about the history of the blues, perhaps more profitably approached as a study in schizophrenia. The second looks for laughs in a world whose last hope against Nazi Republican Christmas-loving rule is a network of sexually irresistible left-wing terrorists who place their fate in the hands of a white male ally. Critics laud both for their firm grasp of our cultural moment.
No awards will be given to the one big movie of 2025 that dares to explore, among other things, why the Oscars will be watched by no one. Despite a budget of $80 million, a Julia Roberts-led cast, and the hot hand of director Luca Guadadigno, After the Hunt got a whopping zero nominations to go with its 37 percent Rotten Tomatoes critic score. The same hype machine that persuaded moviegoers to buy a ticket for Sinners and One Battle After Another operated in reverse to keep most of us from knowing Guadadigno’s latest was in theaters, where it did a measly $3.2 million in domestic business before escaping to Amazon Prime. There it finally presented itself to me late one night last December. Yawning, I pressed play. I expected to last half an hour, tops. Two hours and 20 minutes and only two phone glances later—pausing each time to rewind and catch what I missed, such as the poster for a lecture on “The Future of Jihadism is Female”—it was obvious why the hivemind had been so intent on burying this film.
After the Hunt is the first major motion picture to explicitly name and confront the evil of MeToo.
Making sense of the culture of the 2020s requires a clear understanding of MeToo’s journey. Because the hashtag campaign, sparked in 2017 by accusations against Harvey Weinstein, targeted erstwhile liberal darlings like Weinstein himself, Woody Allen, and Louis CK, it was cheered on by some in the conservative sphere. But this was shortsighted. Not only did MeToo discard any pretense of respecting due process (a patriarchal invention) in its pursuit of men in power, it contributed to the systematic exclusion of a generation of white men from Hollywood. Between 2011 and 2024, white males went from 48 percent to 11 percent of the writer’s room.
Their erasure was reflected on screen, where all sex came to be governed by the fear that someone, somewhere, might be having an erection. Heroic masculinity was out. Traditional romance was out. No more white guys, except as neutered pets or off-screen abusers. No more women talking about men in their absence let alone falling in love with their presence. The male gaze was blindfolded. The cosmic sources of human creation and attraction became taboo. In their place would be a doctrine of female agency that regarded any erotic situation conducted without belabored affirmations of consent on screen and intimacy coordinators off screen was a form of rape—not only for the character, not only for the actress, but also for the audience. Trigger warnings had to be added to productions of the pre-2015 past.
“The male gaze was blindfolded.”
That code of censorship drained show business of its creative lifeblood and historically richest pool of talent. A backlash was bound to come, but it sure took its time. Through the entire first term of Donald Trump, the only public voices of rebellion rose from the witty Pagliaphile world of the Red Scare podcast, whose co-hosts Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova soared to fame by attacking “girlboss feminism” with a deceptively casual air of living-room candor. They saw MeToo as a cynical power grab, fueled by aging actresses seeking revenge for the crime of no longer being objectified. Many in Hollywood listened to the show in lieu of killing themselves.
But Hollywood didn’t begin to catch up until 2021, when HBO released The White Lotus. In the show’s first season, creator Mike White dotted his lush resort mystery with homages to Red Scare, even placing a (dubiously thin) copy of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae in the hands of Zendaya. The homages were not mere decoration. Reactionary antidotes to woke ideology, camouflaged ever so gently in a class-comedy genre veneer, were planted in the series’ DNA. After season one aired, White made his personal affinities clear when he went on the Red Scare-adjacent Perfume Nationalist podcast for an impassioned conversation about Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel.
“Whatever political paper a man may read,” Fiedler once wrote, “his myths are made in the dark before the screen.” After one more very long year, the MeToo resistance finally made its big-screen debut.
The first anti-MeToo film was Tar, starring Cate Blanchett as a demanding conductor with little time for progressive pieties. Liberals watching Tár in the autumn of 2022 probably chuckled along with the audience in the film’s opening scene, when the real-life New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik interviewing protagonist Lydia Tár makes a quip about Brett Kavanaugh. They probably squirmed, with a pang of relief, when Tár eviscerates that “BiPOC pangender” student at Julliard who says that “Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of difficult for me to take his music seriously.” Judging from reviews, they seemed to think they were watching a nuanced, even-handed prestige portrait of a tyrannical artist: the (fictional) first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, a role for which Blanchett took on Leonard Bernstein’s mannerisms with the same virtuosity she brought to her portrayal of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There (2006).
They weren’t entirely wrong. Tár is an expertly realized immersion in the artistic life and process. Absolute control, for the conductor, is just as vital as her sensitivity to sound. The room tone throughout the film is near silent, a soundscape that places us inside Tár’s mind, where every pin drop is a jump scare. Attuned to the burden of such mastery and the unconventional releases it may require, we can hardly fail to hear the social-media time bomb ticking in 2022—until it finally explodes, detonated by the off-screen suicide of a spurned protege Tár might have “groomed.” So what do we conclude when Tár is tarred and feathered without a trial, turned on by everyone who had fawned over her the day before “the e-mails” were released? Perhaps we see it as a trial in separating the art from the artist, a poignant study of power and accountability in these times that are a-changin’.
“Tár is not a judgement so much as a statement you can make your own judgment about. The statement is: We’re in a new world,” wrote Owen Gleiberman in Variety, foreshadowing a run of mainstream raves. As for how conservative pundits reacted, our imaginations need not be taxed. None of them noticed the film, except for one prominent substacker who dismissed it to me in a group chat with his 187-IQ insight that “Lydia Tár is a libtard.”
In this era of overlong films, Tár is one of the few efforts to deserve its two hour and forty minute run time. Todd Field, the director, broke his creative silence of sixteen years to make an extremely serious movie that felt like a farewell to serious moviemaking. In its depiction of MeToo, Tár resembles Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: a sublime Rorschach test for which side of history you stand on. The only problem with a Rorschach test is that there’s no wrong answer. By disguising his great white hero as a lesbian woman and her antagonist as the all-surveilling eye of social media, Field allowed his film to get made and get praised. Unfortunately, most were able to watch it without risk of epiphany that the real monster might be themselves.
The second film to recognize the madness of MeToo was Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario (2023). The Norwegian director’s surreal premise is that a dopey, undistinguished biology professor (Nicolas Cage) goes viral by showing up in strangers’ dreams. It’s always the same kind of dream: some slow-moving disaster breaks out, Professor Matthews appears out of nowhere, and all he can manage to do is shrug helplessly. This wins him fame, bringing his own dreams of a book deal into reach. A cute young staffer at the talent agency he signs with even invites him to fulfill her dream-brewed sexual fantasy. When he botches his chance, the dreams he continues to appear in take a pitch black turn—and he goes overnight from folk hero to public enemy number one. The only publisher who will touch him now is…in France.
I enjoyed Borgli’s unexpected take on the caprices of algorithmic fame, and was grateful for the film’s relatively brief 102-minute runtime. But it left a nasty aftertaste. I realized why after a second viewing. Every frame of Borgli’s satire is infected by the nihilism of those who see something deeply wrong but lack the guts to take a stand. Cancel culture is reduced to a smoke and mirrors accident of technology, bad chiefly because it can victimize innocent morons. There are no sins here, because there is nothing to sin against. There is no vision of humanity that can sustain real comedy or tragedy, so all we get is the soft black mattress of “horror.” Cleverness is fun, but as Dream Scenario and its 2025 spiritual successor Eddington demonstrate, it won’t get us far without at least an attempt at conviction.
From 2023 on, powered by The White Lotus’s transgressive success, anti-woke gestures began to pop up in an array of shows and movies. Sean Baker’s Anora, a cinematic voice message to Red Scare loveline, emerged as the dark horse winner of last year’s Best Picture by flagrantly defying MeToo sex norms A romcom about a stripper and escort who marries her young Russian client on a whirlwind trip to Vegas and then tries to escape the henchmen of his oligarch parents, the film featured nudity, rape jokes, sex scenes, and most radical of all to its Gen Z audience, the intimation of genuine erotic attraction between a man and woman. Grossing $59.3 million on a $6 million budget, Anora gave box office proof of the immense public appetite for a repeal of MeToo censorship. But Hollywood only listened with one ear.
“The code remained in place.”
Further space was carved out in the manner of a naughty imprint for reactionary memes poached from the timeline—so long as they were cloaked in surrealism and kitsch. The code remained in place. Even Anora had to spoil its underdog success by making its Oscar campaign a PSA about…sex-worker rights. Grandma Pam Anderson, makeup-free, was wheeled into the Criterion Closet to applaud Anora starlet Mikey Madison’s bravery for stripping without an intimacy coordinator.
After The Hunt is the first film to rise above this wishy-washy glasnost. The opening titles—using the same font that has come to be identified with Woody Allen’s movies—lead us to a party of Yale people, talking ethics in a fancy apartment. Alma (Julia Roberts) and Hank (Andrew Garfield) are professors on track for tenure, and each other’s beds. Their affair doesn’t seem to bother Alma’s husband Frederik, a resigned psychiatrist played to perfection by Michael Stuhlbarg. Hank isn’t afraid to flirt with anyone, teacher or student, and his approaches are far from unwelcome. He leaves the party with woke black grad student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri). Through the keyhole, Alma watches them stumble mirthfully into the night. But when Maggie shows up at Alma’s apartment the next day, soaking wet from tears and rain, she tells her that after the party, Hank invited himself into her home for another drink and…“A line was crossed.” And we’re off.
Unlike Blanchett in Tár or Cage in Dream Scenario, Garfield’s Hank both is a man and acts like one. He is a steaming pile of sex. If anyone would “cross the line” with a student, he would. But his guilt never matters because, whatever happened that night, Maggie is shown to be a sort of person all too familiar from real life but never depicted so clearly in recent cinema. Privileged and ambitious, she’s also a plagiarist, a liar, a snoop, and “the worst kind of mediocre student.” She also has an obsessive crush on Alma, which explains her grievance with Hank. Rounding out the portrait is her partner, a female-to-male transgender hobby-protestor.
After the Hunt is not about the truth or falsehood of Maggie’s accusation. It is about a world made of lies in which feminine accusation is the predator and male libido the prey. At the end of the film, Alma watches that world burn to the ground in CNN’s coverage of the LA fires, before an anchor’s voice-over mentions Meta’s decision to end its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
“It is obvious why a movie like this was panned by the critics.”
It is obvious why a movie like this was panned by the critics. What is less obvious—and more telling—is the cold shoulder it got from people who should know better. They are the story’s protagonist: not the accuser, nor the accused, but Alma, who can’t find a way to stand for truth and the man she loves because of her own complicity in the rotten system. When Hank is canned and Alma’s insufficient allyship makes her the next target, the mask flies off, and Julia’s Erin Brokovich mode is activated. “What could make you happy?” she steams at a blur-faced grad student in class, warming up for her confrontation with Maggie. “Should we build a society for your exact specifications? Should I build a world for you that has all the edges rounded out, pad your chosen cell with niceties and fucking trigger warnings?” To borrow a term from the post-Soviet world, this is a story about lustration, named for the ancient Latin ritual of purification by purging blood … or in this case, a now-systemic lie that Alma and civilization can no longer afford to stomach.
The ending is a bit of a letdown. But even if he has no idea how to defeat the rot, Guadagnino deserves credit for calling it by its name. He may ultimately get some of that credit. After its underwhelming theatrical run, After the Hunt became number one worldwide on Amazon Prime, defying the denunciations of critics. It’s a reminder of what the movies are still capable of—not least by turning our attention to the Danish masterpiece after which it is named.
Before After the Hunt, there was The Hunt. Directed by Thomas Vinterberg, the 2012 film starring Mads Mikkelsen is set around Christmas in a small town where everyone knows everyone else. Who—but his off-screen ex-wife—wouldn’t love Lukas, the handsome kindergarten teacher who has such a warm and helpful way with children? Klara, five years old, has something of a crush on Lukas, her father’s best friend. He’s the one who picks up the slack whenever she’s hurt and confused by fighting at home. But when he tries to draw a boundary, she makes up a story about him showing her his erect penis—a term she’s heard boys at school mention, but doesn’t seem to understand. Proceeding with a calm and irresistible logic, The Hunt is so in tune with the evil symphony of life that you don’t even notice it has no score.
Unlike the more recent films, Vinterberg’s proto-MeToo masterpiece actually envisions a way out. The hunted Lukas does not mope, does not buy a minivan or go to therapy, and does not embark on a sobriety journey where he becomes an expert on the Epstein files. In the third act, he fights back. He finds loyalty in a lone male friend, and an independent-minded, rapidly maturing son, and together they take a stand. He does not hesitate to fight, even in the pews of the church where the virtuous have gathered for Christmas Day. Those who seek to liberate the arts must follow his example.