Julia Roberts Is Great, But Cate Blanchett Is Still My Cancel Culture Queen

After The Hunt is right about cancel culture, but it's certainly no Tár.

By Audra Heinrichs | September 30, 2025 | 11:58am

Photo: Screenshot

Julia Roberts Is Great, But Cate Blanchett Is Still My Cancel Culture Queen

Somewhere in the press cycle for Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt, I got antsy about what the film would suggest about cancel culture, the stagnancy of the #MeToo movement, and survivor justice. If I had to pinpoint when the nerves set in, perhaps it was after I learned that the Oscar-nominated filmmaker used Woody Allen’s Windsor typeface in its opening credits. Or maybe when its star, Julia Roberts, got defensive about the film’s revival of, as one journalist put it, “old arguments” about believing women. That said, I am relieved to report that After The Hunt‘s bottom line is actually quite right. Spoiler alert: Cancel culture doesn’t actually exist. Nor does “accountability culture,” or any culture in which the people who most deserve cruel consequences actually receive them. Arriving at that conclusion, however, isn’t worth the vexation.

At the center of Nora Garett’s story is Alma Imhoff (played with stellar steeliness by Roberts), a renowned philosophy professor at Yale. From her ripped-from-the-pages-of-Architecture Digest home right down to her Loewe loafers, you immediately glean a certain girlboss-ery that invites easy admirers and even easier adversaries. She champions women—or so we’re told until her favorite student, Maggie Price (Ayo Edebiri, who is sadly no match for Roberts), claims that Imhoff’s colleague and friend, Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), sexually assaulted her after the pair left a gathering at her home.

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Naturally, both parties maintain their innocence and expect allegiance from Imhoff. In true man-who-just-got-caught fashion, Gibson invites Imhoff for lunch to not only assert Price (a queer woman in a relationship with a fellow student) came onto him, but that she’s plagiarizing in her dissertation. Much has been made of Roberts’ performance, but Garfield positing himself as a victim whilst sucking grease from a chicken bone off his fingers is proof positive that he should play a villain more often. Ultimately, Imhoff sides with Price. However, her motivations for doing so urge careful scrutiny. Is Imhoff’s decision a part of a sinister strategy to maintain her good standing and clinch the tenure she and Gibson were in competition for? More importantly, why does Imhoff’s mounting skepticism of Price seem more complex than her lingering loyalty to Gibson or their generational differences? The bulk of the film painstakingly asks the audience to consider each and every possibility before the revelation finally arrives—in the form of an irresponsibly regressive, not to mention statistically slim, trope in the final act.

If you’re hoping to see elitist academics get a morality lesson, you won’t. Instead, unfortunately, you get the notion that all of the characters at fault will be just fine—namely, because if there’s any trap that ensnares Americans more than watching the retribution of powerful people, it’s their subsequent PR rehabilitation and redemption arcs. As we’ve witnessed in real time, a well-written op-ed, some absence from the spotlight, or simply loudly refuting even the most well-documented truth is enough to maintain social and financial capital. That knowledge—that one can simply flout fact—is now a more formidable weapon than any other. The three characters at the center of the film’s conflict boast well-equipped arsenals.

Since its debut at the 2025 Venice Film Festival in August, After the Hunt has been regularly likened to Tár, but comparing the two is an insult to the latter. What established Tár as an exceptional take on what being “canceled” constitutes was its protagonist’s violent resistance to (then gradual submission to) the well-earned humiliation by her own hands. She loses her position, her partner, and, most satisfying of all, her precious self-importance. That payoff allowed the audience to delight in the deserved downfall of a predator as a collective—now an experience made possible only in the movies.

While I tend to agree that the best art is a reflection of its time, I’m personally uninterested in the film’s purported goal. In several interviews, Guadagnino and his ensemble cast have repeatedly stated that their intent was to create conversation, as opposed to taking definitive moral stances. “Everyone has their own truth,” Guadagnino said at a press conference at the Venice Film Festival. “It’s not that one truth is more important than another.” Yet, when every central character’s truth seems the same—to maintain power by any means necessary—any further conversation seems utterly fruitless.

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