After the Hunt Ending Explained: Was Maggie Lying All Along?
After the Hunt swerves past a tidy truth-or-lie ending—five years on, Julia Roberts as Alma Imhoff resurfaces as a dean, a gut-punch turn that forces a rethink of every accusation and alliance.
Spoilers ahead for After the Hunt. If you have not seen it, turn back now. If you have: let us talk about that ending everyone is arguing about.
- Title: After the Hunt
- Genre: Psychological thriller
- Director: Luca Guadagnino
- Main cast: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg
- Rotten Tomatoes: 44% critics, audience score not yet posted
- Status: Now in US theaters
The ending, the wink, and the $20
Five years after the mess that kicks off the film, Julia Roberts character, Professor Alma Imhoff, has quietly leveled up to dean. She slides into a near-empty restaurant, spots Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri), and drops a casual twenty on the table as she gets up to leave.
"You won," Maggie says.
"Cut!" director Luca Guadagnino announces from off-camera.
Yep, the movie literally breaks the fourth wall in the final beat. It is Guadagnino underlining the whole project: performance, perspective, and how easily we buy what looks like truth.
What the movie is actually about (beyond whodunit)
After the Hunt is not trying to give you a clean verdict. It follows Alma as her department gets rocked by sexual assault allegations against her colleague Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield). The fallout hits everyone differently, and that difference is the point.
Here is how it all shakes out: Maggie files a complaint. Hank is fired. Maggie then takes her story to a journalist, which blasts the case into national coverage. Meanwhile, Alma gets raked over the coals for something else entirely: forging prescriptions. The movie contrasts their paths to show how consequences are uneven, how time sands down scandals for some people, and how power and optics can matter more than facts.
Did Maggie tell the truth? The movie wants you stuck on that
The film keeps Maggie’s credibility deliberately slippery. There are signs she might have borrowed from Alma’s past to shape her account. At the same time, we see Hank cross a boundary — he enters her room — which makes any one neat interpretation feel dishonest. The ambiguity is not a bug; it is the thesis.
Alma and Maggie are mirrors, too. The film draws overt parallels: Maggie possibly working the system to her advantage, and Alma’s own moral compromises, from the prescription forgery to the complicated way she has handled her earlier abuse. The story also lays out that Alma once falsely accused a man — a mess tangled up with the fact that he had been involved with her when she was a teenager. Maggie, for her part, points the finger at Hank, who clearly overstepped, but the film never confirms whether the assault itself happened. It leaves you in that uncomfortable gray space on purpose.
The five-year jump and what it is saying
When we land five years later and Alma is wearing a dean’s title, the movie is poking at how institutions forget — or choose to. Alma’s career recovers. Hank’s does not. That imbalance is not framed as justice or injustice so much as reality: outcomes are shaped by who holds power, who faces the cameras, and when the public decides to move on.
The message under the message
The script even name-drops Foucault’s panopticon, which fits: everyone policing everyone, and everyone performing under the gaze. By the end, Guadagnino basically taps the sign with that "cut" — this is a story about stories, and about how our own biases decide who we believe.
After the Hunt is less interested in verdicts than in how verdicts get made. It is a study of perception, consequence, and judgment in a world that wants easy answers but rarely gets them.