Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” is a group of characters in search of a story. All of them are complicated, sometimes with the sort of messy realness that feels something like truth; all of them, in the course of the film, make us struggle to understand them. That we ultimately don’t is Guadagnino and screenwriter Nora Garrett’s failing. “After the Hunt” is full of interesting performances and potentially fraught drama, but ultimately it feels like a failed effort, an attempt to catch a zeitgeist moment as it flies by.

Alma (Julia Roberts) is a philosophy professor at Yale University, where she and her husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) throw elaborate cocktail parties for faculty and students at their enviably plush apartment. At one of those parties, we meet Alma’s younger colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield), with whom she’s in competition for an upcoming tenured position, and graduate student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a favorite of Alma’s. But something happens after the party that we don’t see: A distraught Maggie tells Alma the next day that Hank walked her home and sexually assaulted her; Hank, confronted by Alma later, says he did no such thing.

All of this is in the movie’s opening act; the rest of it deals with the fallout of Maggie’s accusation, Hank’s denial and Alma’s struggle over who to believe and what to do. But Guadagnino and Garrett stack the deck: This movie is far more interested in Alma than it is in Maggie, stranding Edebiri’s strong performance and basking in Roberts’ movie-star luster. The role is an interesting stretch for Roberts — Alma has an unwelcoming brittleness and a simmering anger which frequently erupts, as in when she takes potshots against Maggie’s nonbinary partner (Lío Mehiel) — and she plays it well, capturing a woman who’s theatrically exhausted at the end of a party even though her maid did all the work. But ultimately we’re left with too many questions, about the cipherlike Maggie and about Alma and Hank’s connection. Garfield embraces Hank’s egotism, playing him as the sort of man who always takes up as much physical space as possible (watch the ownership he claims of every room), but the script doesn’t give him many notes to play.

Guadagnino uses little of the knack for visual beauty that he showed in “I Am Love” and “Call Me by Your Name”; this film is mostly shot in dim light, filled with twitches like a perpetually ticking clock, or frequent close-up shots of Alma and Maggie’s hands that show us that the two women have similar taste in nail polish. The score, from frequent Guadagnino collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is nicely and quirkily atmospheric, full of ominous chords and plinking piano keys, adding more suspense than perhaps the film earns. It's odd that Guadagnino clearly wanted to make a movie that people would talk about, but doesn’t seem quite sure of what he wanted it to say.

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‘AFTER THE HUNT’

2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language and some sexual content)

Running time: 2:18

How to watch: In wide theatrical release Oct. 17

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