Luca Guadagnino’s ‘After the Hunt’ throws Andrew Garfield, Julia Roberts, and Ayo Edebiri in their own ‘Oleanna’
The play and the movie Oleanna has haunted me since college. Now, I maybe have After the Hunt to give me a better version of what David Mamet tried to do. And I’d rather see Luca Guadagnino’s take on this rather than Mamet’s anyway.
At CinemaCon, we got to see the trailer for the Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri led film. It tells the story of a charismatic professor (Andrew Garfield) who’s student (Ayo Edebiri) accuses him of sexual assault. The professor’s dear friend and colleague (Julia Roberts) grapples with believing her friend or believing the young woman.
The official synopsis for the film describes Robert’s character as a woman who “finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star pupil levels an accusation against one of her colleagues.” It goes on to say that there is “a dark secret from her own past threatens to come to light.”
For context, the play (and movie) Oleanna tells the story of a professor accused by a student of sexual assault. But in true David Mamet fashion, the woman is made out to be the bad guy with no real nuance to the story. It infuriated me when I engaged with the piece in college and it still is a story that I truly hate thinking about. But watching Guadagnino’s take on a similar story at CinemaCon was intriguing.
The trailer does look a bit more nuanced than what Mamet was trying to do but it is also a complicated subject to break down. The “who do we believe” of it all has been a hot topic of conversation in recent years but from what we saw in the trailer, it does seem as if Guadagnino is bringing both Garfield’s character and Edebiri’s character’s sides to life with Roberts caught in the middle and I can’t wait!
(featured image: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
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