Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt is the latest entry in a bizarre string of thought pieces, (see Apple TV’s The Morning Show), which appear to aim to explore the hypocrisy of cancel culture, pushing back against “#MeToo” and “woke” by asking one central question – “yeah but, did he really do it?”

At least, that’s what I think it was. Amidst the wooden dialogue, overblown runtime, senseless subplots and infuriating pretence of the thing, it was quite difficult to decipher a) what this film wanted to say, and b) whether it wanted to say anything at all.

The premise is admittedly strong, as is the cast. The central roles are occupied by Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri, with Andrew Garfield and Michael Stuhlbarg supporting. Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, a well-regarded Yale University philosophy professor and bastion of feminism, who is on track to secure tenure alongside her sleazebag stroke colleague stroke potential lover Hank, portrayed by Garfield. Edebiri plays Trumpian nightmare Maggie – a rich, ambitious black student whose mediocrity is mitigated by her too-close-for-comfort relationship with Roberts’ Alma. Stuhlbarg, on the other hand, is an infuriating sideshow as Roberts’ husband Frederik, whose over the top affection for his uninterested wife is a constant source of cringe, serving no purpose to the plot whatsoever. Following a boozy intellectual circle jerk, or “party,” at Frederik and Alma’s home, Maggie is walked back to her student apartment by aforementioned lothario Hank. She later appears on Alma’s doorstep, accusing Hank of ambiguous sexual misconduct – forcing Alma into a choice between her professional integrity and her relationship with Garfield, all grease-ball haircut and button-down Ralph Lauren shirts.

What unfolds could have been fascinating. The elements could have lent themselves to an intriguing exposition of class, the murky waters of academia, or the limits to which we are willing to go to do what is right. Quite obviously, there could also have been a discussion of what accusing somebody of sexual assault means, particularly somebody in power. There could have been an allusion to Edebiri’s bravery, a conversation about exploitation, or a reminder of how commonplace all of this really is. Unfortunately, there was absolutely none of that.

Instead, what is serves up is a self-flagellating mess. From a directorial standpoint, all we get are non-sensical close ups of character’s hands, and an imposing soundtrack which *ticks* persistently, presumably in order to create tension, despite the scenes unfolding being about as tense as an episode of Peppa Pig. The script is also unapologetically woeful. Presumably in an attempt to elevate the intellectualism of the exercise, scenes of Garfield, Roberts et al discussing philosophical concepts and writers are ceaselessly pigeonholed. These moments feel like hours. They are nonsensical, tedious, and do nothing other than relay to the viewer that the writers watched a Youtube video about Immanuel Kant the night previous. The dialogue throughout the film is suitably crass and uninventive, with the particular highlight in this regard undoubtedly belonging to a moment whereby, when confronted by Edebiri’s non-binary lover, Roberts’ Alma proudly states “They – go away.”

At its core, in a manner that seems to mirror Garfield’s Hank’s attempts to button his shirt, After the Hunt has absolutely no idea what it is trying to do. Any effort made to place Edebiri at the centre of the story is sidelined by a senseless side plot involving Alma’s unexplained health issues or her husband hanging bras in a bathroom. Any attempt to discuss the folly of student activism or the privilege of “today’s generation” is foiled by petulance from the forces behind the film, usually in the guise of intentionally misgendering non-binary characters or terming their college essays mediocre. Any attempt to say anything, literally anything at all, is drowned out by the aforementioned infuriating soundtrack or a repeated cut scene to Alma’s husband kissing her forehead while she is in bed. The entire thing is infuriatingly opaque, choppy, and as a result, unrelentingly disappointing.

I say disappointing not only because of the obvious quality of the cast or usual standards of the director, but because of what this After the Hunt represents. Throughout, the entire thing felt like an attempt to shine a light on the stupidity of the youth, the folly of the left and the ridiculous nature of cancel culture. Is such a discussion really necessary? Would it have killed the film to at any stage come out and say, yes, rape is bad? Is there any merit at all to villainising student protestors in a climate where they are expelled for speaking out about violence in Palestine, or threats to minorities? Surely the answer is no. Further, The whole vibe of the film was that it seemed to think its ideas were original. In reality, nobody contests that college students are privileged, nobody contests that students are idealistic, and nobody contests that the new generation fails to fetishise pain in the ways that the older one did. Does that mean it’s valid to make those points in a film that’s ostensibly about a college lecturer raping a student? Again, surely the answer is no.

The classlessness of this entire affair is summated by Guadagnino’s choice to pay homage to Woody Allen, a man accused of molesting his adopted daughter, in the film’s opening credits. There, Guadagnino borrows Allen’s font and lists the film’s actors in alphabetical order in Allen’s characteristic style. Taken at its very best, this is a satirical move which is not very funny. Taken at its worst, it is tipping the cap to somebody who is accused of molesting his own daughter in a film which is again, on its face about rape.

One joke that does land, however, is that a film critiquing the pretence of youth runs for nearly two and a half hours – and centers on a Yale philosophy professor, of all people, as its wronged man. Maybe it is for the best that this couldn’t say what it wanted to – what it did manage to splutter out was not all that interesting.

After the Hunt is in cinemas from Oct 17

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The sputtering car comes to a stop outside a business. The driver comes out and asks those inside for help. He’s just trying to get his pregnant wife and precocious young daughter home.

But inside there’s someone who thinks he recognizes this soon-to-be father of two from a past life. He’s convinced that the guy was the same intelligence officer who tortured him for years in prison. Now is the time for revenge.

Written and directed by Jafar Panahi, “It Was Just an Accident” is obviously dark and yet wickedly funny, existential and very, very human as it explores the ripple effects from state violence and asks if forgiveness can ever be offered.

The movie, in Farsi with subtitles, is itself an act of defiance, since Panahi has been jailed for his work and is not legally allowed to make films in Iran, unwilling to have his scripts approved by the government.

Our main hero is Vahid , who we watch as recognizing in horror his old tormentor re-entering his life. Although he was blindfolded while imprisoned, Vahid recognizes the squeak of his interrogator’s prosthetic leg. The camera captures him as he impulsively but methodically abducts the man, takes him to the desert in a van and begins to bury him in the ground.

Wait, hold on. Is Vahid completely sure? The man in the shallow grave insists he’s not a torturer and argues a terrible mistake is being made. Vahid stuffs him in a large box in the van and goes back to the city to reconnect with a band of other former prisoners to ensure they’re making the proper identification. “I have a doubt,” he confesses to them.

We learn there is a world of once-tortured inmates who have learned to lead otherwise ordinary lives after leaving prison, some who lost years just for asking for missing government paychecks. They were interrogated and beaten, told their loved ones had abandoned them, had nooses put around their neck for hours and threatened with rape. “I am a zombie, one of the living dead,” one admits.

Vahid and three former blindfolded prisoners played by Mariam Afshari, Hadis Pakbaten and Mohamad Ali Elaysmehr try to use all their senses: One tries to smell the captive, another listens to his voice and a third feels his leg scars, which he had been forced to do behind bars. Can they be certain the ID is correct? What do they do if it is? Might he be a victim, too?

“We aren’t killers. We’re not like them,” one argues. “If we let him go, he will trap us again,” argues another. “This is a quagmire,” argues another, quite correctly. “We are at war,” is one comment that sums them up as they begin to argue amongst themselves, an old foe dividing them anew.

A fabulous “Waiting for Godot” element descends on the movie as the former prisoners debate in a no-man’s land between life and death as the prisoner is ferried across the city during one long day. Panahi even references the Samuel Beckett play and mimics the setting.

Adding a surreal touch is Pakbaten, playing a bride-to-be wearing her wedding dress for a photo shoot and spending the day in it, driving around with her groom and pushing the van down the road when it breaks down, her fluffy white dress comical in such a grave situation.

Amid the debate over whether to kill their old tormentor or show him the humanity he never showed them, a complication emerges. There’s an emergency at their captor’s home and this ragtag band of broken, angry people come to help, an extraordinary kindness given the circumstances.

Panahi grounds his story in the dusty, street-level realism of modern Iran, with cars honking, dogs barking and crows making a ruckus. At seemingly every turn, people demand tips, from security guards to nurses and gas station attendants and street musicians — hands forever out, a system broken.

The movie has won the Palme d’Or and has been picked by France as its submission to the Academy Awards. That is no accident: Watch it and it will linger in your mind. It’s a movie for Iranians, of course, but it’s valuable for any society hoping to one day mend a divided country.

“It Was Just an Accident,” a Neon release that opens in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday followed by a national rollout, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for language and themes of torture. Running time: 102 minutes. Four stars out of four.

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The funniest thing about Todd Rohal’s “Fuck My Son!” — alas, one of the only funny things about this impressively sick but tiresomely self-amused celebration of bad taste — is that the most controversial aspect of the movie isn’t its title, or its demented story about a gun-packing mother who forces a random woman to have sex with her monstrous son (imagine if the Sarlaac from “Star Wars” had a baby with the alien from “Mac and Me,” nipples and boils everywhere, diaper oozing wet shit, just a gaping hole full of hotdogs where his dick should be), or even how brutally it treats the sex slave’s elementary school-age daughter, Belinda, who will be cooked in an oven if her mom doesn’t comply with their captor’s demands).

No, the most controversial aspect of “Fuck My Son!” is that it uses some very crude and obvious AI for what amounts to roughly 90 seconds of screen time. A number of festival viewers were outraged. I guess some things are just too obscene for audiences to stomach.

Like everything else in Rohal’s film, the AI-afflicted scenes are designed to triple-underline their own grotesqueness. A prologue modeled after an AMC theater pre-show (“No jacking off in the theater,” “Do not pee or crap in your seat,” “Our restrooms are now closed”) is filled out with inhuman crowds, while the characters from Bernice’s favorite show — a “Veggietales”-esque abomination called “The Meatie Mates” — pop up throughout the movie in increasingly artificial form, their every appearance better reflecting the ghoulish slop that today’s children eagerly consume on YouTube. 

As in Radu Jude’s recent “Dracula,” the technology isn’t used as a shortcut (if anything, incorporating AI made Rohal’s work considerably more difficult), but rather as a commentary on the soullessness of modern “art.” Reactive to a world in which people have become more offended by form than content, “Fuck My Son!” exists to explore the efficacy of shock value at a time when image-making itself has become so repulsive and society has ingested its own memetic sickliness as a sign of the future. 

Rohal wants to push back against the numbing dystopia of Project 2025, so he’s cooked up a collective experience — one that will tour across the country, advertising its lack of streaming availability as its greatest hook — designed to startle us back to our senses and restore the sheer joy of transgression. Little other joy is on offer (either within this movie, or outside of it), but “Fuck My Son!” feels like it was only made to indulge in the fact that it still could be.

So while I may not have particularly enjoyed the experience of watching it, I have no choice but to admit that it does, indeed, exist. Critics are raving “This is a real thing that people made.” Put it on the poster. 

Of course, this material didn’t originate with Rohal; an idea as pure and profound as “Fuck My Son!” has to come from somewhere. Usually it’s from a divine vision or the liquid meth they sell at the front of America’s finest gas stations. In this case, it came from a graphic novel: Johnny Ryan’s “Fuck My Son: A Tale of Terror, Issue One,” which Rohal has faithfully adapted like a sacred text. And that’s just as well, because the movie has no interest in making such intellectual property more palatable to a wider audience.

Either you want to see a movie called “Fuck My Son!” or you don’t (“It’s just garbage,” the director has said. “It’s made by trashmen for trashmen”), and Rohal’s film is squarely targeted at the people who might conceivably pay for a ticket; the aforementioned pre-show offers viewers the choice of “Perv-o-Vision” glasses that make all of the characters naked, or a “Nude Blok” edition for those who pray to “fill their lives with blissful ignorance and intolerance” (the film’s spirit all but requires comparisons to John Waters, even if its execution cleaves a lot closer to early James Gunn). 

The world of “Fuck My Son!” is a small and seedy place where every mote of innocence only exists as an invitation for perversion, or worse. We first meet Sandi (Tipper Newton, recalling Sarah Silverman in her ability to conflate innocence with repulsion) as she takes little Bernice (Kynzie Colmery) dress shopping, where — of course — a peeper is spying on all of the dressing rooms. Shot like an ’80s Z-picture but always self-indulgent enough to make clear that it’s in on the joke, the movie soon introduces its leading ladies to an overbearing mother (a Chris Farley-esque Robert Longstreet, growling in drag) who’s fallen and can’t get up. 

But it’s a trap! The mother lures Sandi and Bernice to her van, knocks them out, and takes them to the remote farmhouse where she lives with her mutant son Fabian (Steve Little). There’s so much sex in the world, and she can’t stand the thought that her sweet child will never get to have any of it. The mother wheels Fabian in, places Bernice nearby with a front-row view, and — wait for it — demands that Sandi fuck her son. Bareback. “Person to Person” star George Sample III eventually shows up to round out the cast, but that’s really about all there is to it. As positioned to Sandi, the terms couldn’t be simpler: “The sooner you fuck my son, the sooner I’ll let your daughter out of the oven.” What’s a mother to do? 

Rohal pays lip-service to the idea that parents will do anything for their children, but this movie is much less interested in developing its themes than it is in watching Sandi fish around Fabian’s innards for his Lovecraftian penis (spoiler alert: she finds it, and the massive appendage becomes a veritable character in its own right). Is it gross? Very.

But the grossness doesn’t scale at a particularly engaging rate, and while Rohal’s agenda required a certain amount of cheekiness to validate the fun of its own shock value, it’s hard to overlook the reality that “Fuck My Son!” is far less disturbing than the movie promised by its title. For all of its eldritch horrors (Fabian’s penis eventually penetrates almost everything you can imagine, with child rape being the most obvious red line that Rohal won’t cross), this heightened story is too “fun” to be even half as fucked up as the things we read in the headlines every day, and not funny enough for its increasingly whacked out “WTF”-ness to be enjoyable on its own terms. Things get wild because they can, and then slaphappy because they can’t be anything else.

When a title card pops up that reads: “The Ending: Part I,” the joke is that a movie with so little substance would require something as pompous as a multi-tiered epilogue. 

What meaning there is behind “Fuck My Son!” is easy enough to understand: Enjoy this kind of garbage while you can, because it won’t be long before late night TV hosts are locked in jail, Donald Trump starts talking about Eddington as if it were a real town he saw on Fox News, and everyone who saw “One Battle After Another” is labeled as a card-carrying member of Antifa (the “A” in “AMC A-List” stands for “Anarchy”). Appreciate when slop could still be a display of defiance instead, and not just the visual language of cultural defeat. See “Fuck My Son!” not because it’s good, but rather because it refuses to pretend that it isn’t bad. If only that argument were enough to convince me that it shouldn’t have been better.

Grade: C-

“Fuck My Son!” opens at the IFC Center in New York City on Thursday, October 16, before traveling to other theaters around the country. Its full touring schedule can be found here.

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