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The characters in Luca Guadagnino‘s forthcoming dramatic thriller,Into the Hunt,are obsessed with language —the words that are said, and even more so, the ones left unspoken. Early in the first trailer for the film, Andrew Garfield‘s overzealous academic Hank pokes at Ayo Edebiri‘s Maggie, an overachieving student enrolled in a course taught by Julia Roberts‘ Professor Alma Olsson. “All your generation, you’re scared of saying the wrong thing,” he says. “When did offending someone become the preeminent cardinal sin?”
Maggie readies her rebuttal, suggesting with an edge of snark, “Maybe it’s around the same time your generation started making sweeping generalizations about ours?” Throughout the trailer, the film blurs the lines between what should be completely black and white situations. When Hank’s playful academic debates escalate to the point of sexual assault, Maggie confides in Alma, believing she’ll take the facts for what they are. But Alma and Hank have a history, and always will, as she tells her husband.
When Maggie tells her that Hank “crossed the line” after a nightcap, Alma responds, “But what actually happened?” And when Alma confronts Hank, he attempts to spin the narrative as an academic violation. He insists that he caught Maggie cheating. The plagiarism accusation doesn’t align with the portrait the professor painted earlier in the trailer of one of her star students, one of brilliance, but not obsession, as her husband would have suggested. “You tend to choose people because they worship you,” he told her.
The turmoil spreads across campus, with looks of pity exchanged alongside expressions of distrust and uncertain suspicion. “I worked too hard, done too much to get here to let it all be just taken away,” Hank declares through fury. Another figure, Chloë Sevigny’s Kim, questions why Maggie spoke up at all, asking, “I believe her, but whatever happened to stuffing everything down like the rest of us?” All the while, Maggie is perplexed as to how “a young Black woman can get assaulted and all these white people find a way to make it about themselves.”
In theaters Oct. 17, After the Hunt marks Guadagnino’s latest film since last year’s Challengers and Queer.
