We open the movie at an after-hours party that slides us into Yale academia with Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), a beloved philosophy professor who has what every professor secretly wants: a protégé who worships and validates her. That’s Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), a rising-star grad student who is at once a minority, Black and lesbian, and also someone from a background of wealth and privilege. Maggie’s future is practically gift-wrapped by Alma’s patronage and support of her thesis. Also orbiting Alma is her charismatic colleague and best friend Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), another tenure-track big brain. Hank feels threatened by his own normalcy as a cishet white man, and is all the more of a try-hard as compensation. The last major figure in the story is Alma’s husband, Frederik Mendelssohn (Michael Stuhlbarg), a therapist who is jaded about the academic scene and Alma’s peers.

The next day, Maggie approaches Alma and accuses Hank of sexual assault in an encounter after the party, which Hank vehemently denies. And thus, Alma finds herself jammed between her student, her friend, her own ambitions, her marriage that is healthy but always at risk of slipping into turbulence, and a professional ecosystem built on an illusion that everyone can be cheerful collaborators in a big brain-swinging competition.

That’s right, this is a story about how a bystander’s life got uncomfortable when somebody else was assaulted. Yikes. It minimizes the victim’s experience and seriously presents the possibility that the victim is lying or exaggerating her claims, a scenario that studies repeatedly show is vanishingly rare. At face value, After the Hunt reeks of a powerful man hand-wringing about cancel culture.

And so the big surprise for me is that I do not hate After the Hunt, even when I recoiled from what characters were saying or doing, even when I questioned where the camera lingered. In fact, I like this film quite a bit. Guadagnino reeled me in, and I’ve traced that mostly to two main forces.

First: Guadagnino is a sensational director, and I mean that in two senses. He’s a world-class technician with immaculate control — precise camera movements, close-ups that intensify and refract emotions, an indelible sense of rhythm — and he also provokes intense feelings, especially for such a talky, idea-dense script. Material that would play as shrill in lesser hands instead connects as intermittently intimate and explosively evocative. Unlike the sweaty, kinetic Challengers, he doesn’t spice up the staid setting; instead, he makes it peaty like Scotch, still and aromatic except when it burns. It’s sometimes hazy like good buzz, other times blue and cold and nauseating like a hangover headache. That Guadagnino evokes such textural sensations from material like this is the mark of visionary greatness.

Second: the film actually pulls off a layered story about sick institutions without completely collapsing into nihilistic flop sweat — which is more than I can say for Ari Aster’s Eddington. Guadagnino threads a needle between “our systems are irrevocably broken and dehumanizing and “these are still recognizable, complicated souls staggering through them.” On the surface, you’ve got your he-said/she-said accusation and the grinding machinery of public litigation of the alleged crime. And just beneath that is a second, richer story; a nasty little turf war: academics clawing for leverage, crafting public personas and private alliances, gaming the optics of “believe women” while quietly calculating whose career is worth sacrificing.

Then there’s the third story layer, the one Guadagnino mostly tells visually: a twisted, cross-generational love triangle where students and professors covet and resent one another in equal measure. People want to own each other — intellectually, sexually, professionally — and also to smash the codependencies they’ve built. Frederik, Alma’s husband, constantly observes Freudian dynamics and pointing them out to Alma in false playfulness: Isn’t it strange the way Alma and Maggie operate like a couple? Or that horny Hank’s swagger is performative and manicured? Frederik’s disdain for Maggie and Hank is obvious, and a reaction to Alma’s latent attraction to her academic peers (and also a skepticism that Alma would even associate with that crowd).

Guadagnino saves the film’s fourth, deepest layer for late in the film: a revelation from Alma’s past that reframes the whole narrative as a story about how cruelty and abuse don’t move in straight lines. Harm travels in cycles, handed down and reinterpreted and morphing along with unreliable memories and cultural mores. The film seems genuinely interested in how impossible it is to draw a clean arrow labeled “victim” and “villain” when those roles depend, at least partially, upon context, personal viewpoint, and storytelling. (Or do they?)

It’s also no coincidence that all of these academics study philosophy: they’re constantly thinking about how they fit in the world and what it all means. The over-intellectualize their experiences and emotions, to the point that Guadagnino plays it as black comedy: One scene of an on-edge Alma sparring with an undergrad about a philosophical concept is so clearly a mirror of her own issues, and it’s so clear that Alma is aware of this, that I actually laughed at the undergrad’s defeated submission. (It’s, in essence, a much sharper version of the scene of Agnes teaching Lolita in Sorry, Baby.)

Roberts and Garfield are excellent in this: Roberts in particular makes Alma’s self-image crack one hairline fracture at a time, until you realize how much of her intellectual self-superiority is a manifestation of her vanity and fear; she needs to be the smartest in the room, lest she be the smallest. Garfield gives Hank the exact ratio of charm to sleaze where you’d absolutely believe students would go out for drinks with him and regret it later. But Edebiri feels badly miscast. This part gives her very little room to deploy the things she’s good at (e.g., be funny; be charming), and the movie is weirdly uninterested in her inner life. For a story that nominally spins around her accusation, we spend a lot more time watching older colleagues workshop their damage than taking Maggie seriously as a person.

The presentation, as noted, is outstanding. Cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed is best known for his work with Spike Lee and for shooting moody but electric videos for Black musicians, including Beyonce’s Lemonade. His pairing with Guadagnino, and for this specific material, is a curveball, as he hadn’t shot a feature film in almost 30 years prior to this. But it’s undoubtedly a success, an intoxicating but well-disciplined visual schema. Meanwhile, the film sounds just as great as it looks, with a terrific, somewhat restrained score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross which sets a perfectly anxious mood. It’s a bit of a shame the critical drubbing means all that good craft work will get ignored come award season.

For all that I like, though, After the Hunt is a deeply flawed movie. Guadagnino’s instincts tilt more cynical than insightful the longer he lingers on doubts about the accusation rather than its fallout. A briefly-teased possibility of a Rashomon-style look at multiple incompatible truths intrigued me; instead, the film mostly sticks to an “objective” vantage point while characters monologue about what they remember. That choice lets the movie posture as bold and ambiguous without actually embodying that ambiguity in its form in any meaningful way (but would these philosophy academics permit the possibility of multiple realities?). When push comes to shove, the naysayers are not wrong: After the Hunt feels like a privileged man moping about accountability, hovering dangerously close to a “what if the cancel mob went too far?” thinkpiece… just with, you know, spectacular lighting and blocking.

But the movie works more than it doesn’t; or, at least, it provokes me in ways I can’t dismiss. There’s a real charge in watching a director as gifted as Guadagnino take a huge, messy swing at the ugliest parts of contemporary academia (mirroring modern society), even if he launches more of a foul ball than a home run, then basks in the boos. After the Hunt wallows in its own moral murk, sometimes irresponsibly. But it captures something queasy and throbbing about how institutions absorb scandal, chew up and spit out the affected, and keep chugging along. I left more uneasy than enlightened, but I also left thinking about it, like truly pondering what I felt and why — which, in this case, might be the best outcome the film could hope for.

I can see this thematic maximalism being a drawback to the film; we live in an age where “elevated horror” is a buzzword for the glut of films (A24 and otherwise) that aim to inject their spooky scares with big intellectual and psychological ideas, often at the expense of said spooky scares. The density and breadth of Suspiria make it exhausting in a way my favorite horror films never are.

Nonetheless, I quite liked this movie; not as much the 1977 original, but close. (For the record, I don’t have Dario Argento’s cult classic ranked as a masterpiece; it’s a stylistic marvel, but far too lumpy as a piece of storytelling. I do, though, hold a special place in my heart for it, as it was the topic of our first podcast episode.) This remake is so good at creating and sustaining a thick, murky mood. Violence always seems just around the corner during the unsettling, elliptical character drama of Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) and her peers.

Guadagnino has assembled quite the cast for his film: In addition to Johnson, who brings a compelling light touch to such a grave film, we have Mia Goth and Chloë Grace Moretz as fellow students, plus a bevy of character actors as their instructors. None rise above Tilda Swinton, though, which is no surprise. Swinton is great as the cold dancing instructor Madame Blanc. She also plays an astonishing double-role and an even more memorable triple-role as the film hits its climax. Her heavily made-up appearance as a curious and sensitive male psychologist is so good, I was scrolling through IMDb on my phone as I watched, trying to see who played him, confused because I only saw women in the cast list.

Much of the film’s construction is remarkable, but no formal element stands out as much as the editing. There is some truly bewildering editing in this film by Walter Fasano, and it works on a multi-tiered level. Within individual scenes, the cuts are uneven and jagged, often eschewing the 180-degree rule, for a thoroughly disorienting effect. The film sometimes bounces between settings and even time periods as if disparate shots were part of a continuous flow. Often, the score abruptly drops or shifts. It breaks all the ironclad rules of continuity, but for all the right reasons: Mainly, to leave us as uneasy and drowned in psychological fatigue as its characters.

Suspriria runs 152 minutes, and this is its biggest flaw. If you’re going to be a big, slightly incoherent stew, better to get in and out before the audience gets bored. If you’re not pulled into its overbearing sense of dread, I suspect this will be a deeply boring film for the majority of its runtime. But I was pulled in, and found that the movie didn’t feel too far stretched past its comfort point. Certainly, the climactic half hour that leads to the 10 minute coda glue your eyes to the screen as it descends into apocalyptic mania.

I haven’t touched on other tremendous aspects of the film: The incredible sets, which echo the geometric design of the Argento original, filled with mirrors for both aesthetic and thematic purposes. The sparing use of color gives the film’s hellish descent even more impact (though it begs the question of why one would remake Suspiria in 80% grays and tans). And there’s one early kill so creative and visceral it made me queasy.

It adds up to a big movie that probably could have done with being a bit smaller. But Suspiria is, against the odds, a worthy remake that doesn’t even really bother with the pressure of being a remake. It’s just its own beastly thing, and, what’s more, its own beastly good thing.