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“When did offending someone become the preeminent cardinal sin?”
This is a question asked by Hank (a slightly sleazy-looking Andrew Garfield) just a few moments into the first official trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt. The question comes at the end of a very predictable tirade about how Gen Z is just too sensitive these days. His young foil, ambitious college student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), responds with: “Maybe around the same time your generation started making sweeping generalizations about ours.”
Both Hank and Maggie are dutiful followers of successful college professor Alma (Julia Roberts), who ends up at the center of a sexual assault scandal when Maggie accuses Hank of going too far after walking her home from a party. But based on the trailer, the film seems less concerned with the aftermath of sexual assault than with how such an event exposes cultural differences across generations. Maggie is perfectly clear when she explains what happened; Hank claims she made it up after he accused her of plagiarizing. More unexpected is the response of one of Alma’s friends, played by Chloë Sevigny. She believes Maggie, but objects to her insistence making her accusations public: “Whatever happened to stuffing everything down like the rest of us?”
Intergenerational conflict has had a bit of a spotlight lately—think Everything Everywhere All at Once, or the more recent (and much less nuanced) Clown in a Cornfield. But whether After the Hunt can elevate its commentary on generational divides above the very obvious idea that younger generations are too easily offended and older generations are too bitter and jaded to understand a younger point of view remains to be seen. The most exciting parts of the trailer focus on who the characters are outside of their generational archetypes—for instance, the suggestion that Alma mainly keeps Maggie and Hank around because of their worship-like devotion to her, or Maggie’s implied romantic feelings for Alma, complicated by an imbalanced power dynamic. Following the tense sexual energy of Challengers, we’re certainly excited to see where this goes.
After the Hunt is set for limited release on Oct. 10, 2025 and a wide release on Oct. 17, 2025.
