After an incredible run of films of the calibre and ilk seldom seen, Luca Guadagnino returns with After the Hunt, which arrived with a provocative premise, stellar cast and a presumed great directorial match, but faded quickly into one of the year’s biggest disappointments.

The film centres itself on Alma (Julia Roberts), a philosophy professor at an Ivy League college who finds herself at an extreme crossroads when her star student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), accuses her colleague and close friend, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of assault. Caught morally, as a woman and feminist, personally, as a close friend of the accused and idol of the accuser, and professionally, as a candidate for tenure in competition with Hank, Alma’s life is upended as she attempts to navigate the situation.

Despite its potential, the film ends up feeling incoherent and almost impenetrable. Its politics are messy and it doesn’t know what it trying to say; it feels as though the film thinks it is enough to simply allude to or bring up many zeitgeisty, hot-button topics, without actually exploring them in any meaningful way. The unevenness of the film ultimately feels like a lack of direction and a fear to commit to these topics or offer a viewpoint, even if that viewpoint is supposed to be the lack of clarity that comes from a multitude of perspectives and motives. Little is fleshed out beyond the film’s conceit and ultimately After the Hunt ends up as a muddled series of disjointed scenes that leave you scratching your head, unsure what to make of them (and not in a good way that serves the story).

The cast do well with what they have – Roberts, in particular, is really excellent as the film’s knotty centre, navigating the complexities her character is dealing with and allowing her inner debates to play subtly across her face. However, most of the characters are so opaquely written that the actors have little to work with and the film suffers in connecting emotionally with the audience. The characters have little depth and are mainly stand ins to facilitate the introduction of a multitude of messy, under-explored topics, so much so that watching it feels almost purely a frustratingly under-stimulating intellectual exercise. The cast keep it watchable, but the film drags, particularly towards the end.

The film is elegantly made, but certain decisions sometimes detract from the story rather than serve it. The cinematography is at times interesting and at times incredibly distracting. Breaking the rules of composition and cinematic language can absolutely be effective, but do it too often, and with a lack of real subtext, it can take the audience out of the film. One scene in particularly constantly cuts between shots that frame characters so haphazardly, the eye doesn’t know where to look causing a dissonance that instead of being effective, leaves you struggling to follow the conversation of the scene. However, at other points, striking and creative framing offers moments of inspired intrigue that elevates the dialogue taking place. There is also an increasingly frustrating choice to include a clock ticking at various points throughout the film, something that is used so often it lacks power and instead begins to irritate.

It almost feels as though, at times, you can see what the filmmakers were grasping towards, but it all falls flat. There is probably a world (or a stan on the internet) where an argument could be made that a lot of the criticisms of the film were intentional choices – ambiguity, inaccessibility, unnatural stiltedness – but there is simply too much of it for it to be deliberate and the film is far too messy for any of it to have impact. The film’s final moment seems to almost recontextualise what had come before, and had the film as a whole held up, it could have been seen as a masterstroke, however, as it stands it comes across as a confusing, unearned add-on that seems to want to signpost towards the film’s ultimate point (which remains muddled and unclear).

Ultimately, this is a perplexing misfire, but not one that will stop me from buying my opening weekend ticket for Guadagnino’s next release.