Julia Roberts in Luca Guadagnino #MeToo Drama

If the loudly insistent ticking clock in the opening minutes of After the Hunt gets on your nerves, then brace yourself, because you’re about to get clobbered with two-and-a-quarter hours of it. Not just the intermittent clock, but the mind-numbing academia-speak, the hyper-articulate inter-generational savagery and the streams of circuitous talk about thorny ethics, sexual violations and contentious power dynamics. Director Luca Guadagnino and first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett seem convinced this is all very provocative, very now with its hard questions and subjective truths. But frankly it’s very five years ago, which makes it more punishing.

Given that Guadagnino’s greatest strengths have always been as a humanist, a sensualist and a bold visual stylist, it’s baffling what drew him to material so aridly intellectual, stark and emotionless despite trafficking heavily in trauma. It seems almost implausible that the gifted filmmaker who just gave us the sizzling buoyancy of Challengers and the heady intoxication of Queer could deliver something so dour and airless. The Woody Allen-type main title treatment makes you wonder if Guadagnino is doing his version of a 21st century Interiors, a Bergman homage I’d sooner watch again than this, for Maureen Stapleton alone.

Maybe it was a desire to work with Julia Roberts, for whom this is an undeniably strong showcase, pouring herself into a character who’s all sharp edges with scarcely a glimmer of warmth, an expert at hiding her feelings or anything even remotely personal. But as riveting as she is, Roberts ultimately is ill-served by a film so studiously cryptic that it ends up just frustrating. To be fair, there are several electric confrontations, distributed evenly enough to ensure that After the Hunt remains absorbing. But even so, this is a date movie to be used in relationship sabotage maneuvers.

Yes, it’s part of the point that every major character in this insular bubble of wealth, privilege, intellectual elitism and vigilant cultural sensitivity — I refuse to call it “wokeism” — is insufferable to some degree, even if they don’t start out that way. That’s all very well and it’s not as if movies are required to fill a quota of sympathetic characters. But this bunch becomes steadily more distancing. Oh, except for Chloë Sevigny, dryly amusing in a frump wig as jaded feminist psychotherapist Kim, who only perks up when she hears Morrissey crooning “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.”

Even the normally surefire element of a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, with its blasts of dissonance pumping up the squirm factor, adds to the heavy-going effect of a movie that seems to go out of its way to be grating.

Roberts plays Yale philosophy professor Alma Imhoff, who, along with her department colleague and closest friend Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), can almost taste the tenure she knows her work has earned. As the drinks flow during a gathering of faculty and PhD students at their deluxe digs, Alma’s doting husband Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg), another shrink, teasingly asks what happens if one of them gets tenure and the other doesn’t. Would the friendship survive it?

Hank is a self-satisfied peacock and chronic flirt. So much so that when someone later says, “Everybody loves Hank,” you might think, “Wait, are we talking about the same guy?” Much of his attention that evening is focused on Alma’s star doctoral student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), who responds to his playful taunting about why her generation is so guarded by pinpointing it to the moment his generation started making sweeping generalizations about them.

When opinionated classmate Arthur (Will Price) gripes about how inclusivity has bumped men like him out of the competitive academic ranks, Maggie is quick to clap back. As a queer Black woman, she has no time for “white, male, straight, cis” people crying about victimhood after an eternity of automatic advantage. Alma concurs.

But late the next day, when she finds Maggie on her doorstep soaked from the rain and weeping, Alma is more cautious about her solidarity. Clearly in distress, Maggie stammers out her account of what happened after the party, when Hank walked her home, asked to come up for a nightcap, started kissing her and refused to stop despite her repeatedly saying, “No.” She says he crossed a line, and when Alma asks how far over the line he went, Maggie bolts, muttering that it was a mistake to expect support.

To the filmmakers’ credit, this does not become another “he said/she said” dialectic descendent of David Mamet’s Oleanna, even if Hank’s blustery explosion of self-righteous anger seems to point that way. He claims he went to Maggie’s apartment solely to challenge her privately about what he describes as flagrant plagiarism in one of her papers for him.

There’s also a tang of resentment in the fact that Hank grew up without money and has had to work hard to rise in his field, while he thinks Maggie is a mediocre student for whom doors have been opened by having billionaire parents among the top college donors. But even before his stunning eruption into vituperative rage in the hall outside Alma’s classroom — played to the hilt by Garfield — it’s clear that Hank is such a douche it stops mattering whether he’s guilty or innocent.

While he knows nothing of the alleged sexual violation, Frederick also has his doubts about Maggie, needling his wife for allowing her vanity to be stoked by a student who’s possibly in love with her. “Is she brilliant, or does she just think you’re brilliant?” Frederick asks Alma.

Stuhlbarg, who should have gotten much more attention for his beautiful performance in Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, deserves better than Frederick. He projects serene emotional maturity and makes cassoulet like it’s a sacred offering yet isn’t averse to infantile tantrums of petulant jealousy. While he often unwinds after a day of seeing patients by blasting John Adams at maximum volume, a scene in which he does something similar while flouncing in and out of the kitchen where Alma and Maggie are trying to talk might make you want to kill people. He becomes like an unfunny New Yorker cartoon.

Edebiri brings her customary emotional depth to Maggie, putting us in her corner when she presses charges and then gets uncomfortable with the attention the scandal generates around her at Yale. However, Garrett seems to want to have it both ways with the character (who’s writing her dissertation on virtue ethics), giving her integrity but then undermining her with doubts and eyeroll-inducing Gen Z clichés. The suggestion that this rich kid might be partnered with a they/them-identifying trans law student and live in a shitty apartment for the optics seems a cheap shot.

But the center of the drama is firmly occupied by Alma, who is so secretive she keeps quiet about an illness that causes her debilitating pain and nausea. (Even with sudden uncontrollable spasms, she manages not to get vomit on her chic white cropped pants and penny loafers.) Any loyalty she has to Maggie gets obliterated when the student reveals intimate knowledge of Alma’s history that makes her think the professor might have suffered a similar experience.

In Alma’s view, Maggie crossed a different kind of line. Roberts brings a jolt of invigorating fury to one of the movie’s strongest scenes, in which the mentor rips into her mentee in public on a campus square with a fully detailed character assassination. Hilariously, Alma shoves Maggie’s partner Alex (Lío Mehiel) to the sidelines by sniping: “Don’t you have some obscure fucking protest that you should go and be angry at?” Alma belittles every one of Maggie’s life choices with a blistering scorn she later regrets. Or doesn’t.

To some extent, the script takes pains to keep Alma unreadable. (Though when she asks Frederick if he thinks she can be cold, I mumbled, “Oh, girl, are you kidding?”) When she rushes to speak with the Dean of Humanities (David Leiber) and request that she be kept out of the school’s inquiry into the alleged abuse, is she protecting her career, staying neutral out of respect for her long friendship with Hank, or shrewdly planning for his elimination from the tenure race?

These are all interesting questions, like many others raised in the script. But the movie makes a definite choice not to answer them, even in a big-twist epilogue five years later. That might have been an audacious move in a film less strident and more subtle. But the blanket refusal here to throw the audience a bone seems like self-conscious obfuscation.

Sure, it’s exciting to watch Roberts sprout horns and turn spiky with defensiveness in another great scene when a student questions whether she “condones othering someone rather than advocating against it.” But we deserve more substantial compensation after spending more than two hours with these people.