As an ambitious and miserable Yale philosophy professor, Julia Roberts paces Luca Guadagnino's pretend-provocative noir "After the Hunt" in a prepster uniform of monogrammed tote bag and immaculate white slacks. Alma is secretly sick. Yet, when she kneels in a campus stall to puke, those white pants remain fastidiously unsullied. The idea is that Alma has practice keeping her image clean.

She'll need it. A student named Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) has accused Alma's fellow teacher and favorite drinking buddy, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assault. Hank counters that he'd followed Maggie home from a party because he caught her cheating on her thesis about performative virtue signaling. Is Hank a clichéd creep or is Maggie a middling talent destroying her supervisor before he destroys her? Their dueling he-said/she-said accounts go unreconciled. No one, not even Guadagnino and the screenwriter Nora Garrett, sincerely cares what happened that night in Maggie's apartment. All that matters is the public reaction. Will this dirty business foul up anyone's career?

Guadagnino adores a bold backdrop. Just last year, he set naughty tales in the worlds of competitive tennis ("Challengers") and Mexican dive bars ("Queer"). The Ivy League is rich with possibilities. His take on New Haven opens with trolling Woody Allen-style credits over the sound of a ticking clock and the nation's supposedly brightest thinkers airily hashing out this era's flash point question: Is cancel culture legitimate justice?

In classrooms and bars, at meals and department meetings, Alma and her colleagues bat around 12-letter words and sophisticated in-jokes, with Garfield's cocky blue-collar-born Hank wisecracking that "Hegel couldn't control Little Hegel" to a crowd that's well-aware the 19th-century philosopher had an illegitimate son with his Bavarian landlady. Everyone is corrupt, these smarty-pants nod, while touching each other a bit more than they should. To underline the innuendo, cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed frames Hank with an erect wine bottle in his crotch.

These Yale folk want to win the conversation, not brainstorm a better way to live. Fine with Guadagnino since he doesn't believe there's an answer anyway. He's made a mystery with no curiosity, a cautionary tale with no good advice. It's unclear if Guadagnino's elites believe their moral arguments don't apply to themselves or if they're just stupid — or if the script makes them do stupid things to keep the audience off guard. Regardless, raise a glass of Pinot anytime someone says "This was a mistake."

Guadagnino's driving interest is attacking academia as a rat's nest of egomaniacs and cowards and insular, faux-radical thinking. The cold lighting has visible contempt for everyone onscreen — including the dean (David Leiber) who tuts, "I'm in the business of optics, not substance" — and emergency sirens are continually screaming past windows. One scene takes place outside a lecture called "The Future of Jihadism Is Female," a title chosen presumably as just the sort of thing to give Fox News days of much-needed distraction. We don't actually hear the speaker make their case.

Alma and Hank are both tenure-track, a phrase that implies that they must remain affixed to their path or get derailed. They cling to their branding as Yale people. Maggie's desires are hazier — her defining personality trait is a lack of personality. A queer woman in a relationship with a nonbinary law student named Alex (Lío Mehiel), she's charged with being a mediocre intellectual, of molding herself into an Alma clone, even of being erotically obsessed with Alma, although the film doesn't push the last idea too far, perhaps out of a caution that it plays into offensive tropes about predatory homosexuals.

We're fairly deep into the film before we learn that Maggie's family is also rich — really rich, as in they've funded several Yale buildings. That just layers on more unanswered questions like: What's keeping her from wielding that clout and why is she only getting legal advice from her romantic partner and not whatever professionals her parents presumably have on retainer? Her vaguely written wealth feels like something pasted onto the script at the last second to make us feel less sympathy for Maggie than we would if she was genuinely powerless. It's a j'accuse of our own bias.

Alma is desperate to dodge any backlash from the scandal, so we're frustrated to experience this story through her averted eyes. Her generation was inculcated to cozy up to men in power and treat younger women like competition or pets; she keeps her conscience as compartmentalized as a box of fishing tackle. To her, Maggie's willingness to be seen as a victim is confounding. As her psychiatrist friend Kim (Chloë Sevigny) groans, "Whatever happened to stuffing everything down and developing a crippling dependency habit in your 30s?"

Alma's own shame happened in pre-online times. Not even her husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), knows about it. The only evidence is an old newspaper clipping and, more metaphorically, the illness that has her doubling up in agony and reaching for booze and prescription drugs — a symbol of how unhealed pain continues to destroy her life.

Frederik, a therapist, seems like the voice of reason. We only start to wonder if he's a tad cracked himself after a catty dinner-table meltdown that comes out of nowhere (and is an entertaining highlight). Later, Alma discovers Frederik conducting classical music with a spatula over the stove, hair graying and wild like he's starring in "Das Kitchen des Dr. Caligari." I can't say if that visual gag is on purpose, but there's an awful lot of German names in here for a movie that takes place in Connecticut. (According to the credits, even Hank's legal name is Henrik.)

The script buries its live-wire ideas harmlessly underground. Every character has intriguing, suppressed triggers — crushes, past lovers, mommy issues, jealousies — that would complicate how we interpret their behavior if they weren't hidden until the end of the film. Trying to parse their motivations is like making out the writing on a chalkboard that's been erased. It doesn't provoke anything but frustration.

I wish the movie made me more uncomfortable. The actors try. Roberts commits to being dreary and severe with an emotional climax that stress-tests the hashtag #BelieveWomen. Garfield is all galling charisma and Edebiri is in some pallid register, like a Victorian ghost that you're not sure whether to fear. Each delivers their justifications straight to the camera in harsh ultra-close-ups, hellbent on convincing the audience to agree with them.

Hank's not wrong that a man in his defensive crouch can't exonerate himself. We've already heard every excuse. Still, even in a movie where people are always skulking around rifling through each other's things, his claim that he chose a drunken late night to confront Maggie about plagiarism sounds inconceivable. Guadagnino makes Hank look so shady that it feels like a taunt: We're dumb if we trust Hank and doubly dumb if he's innocent. And if Hank is a genius manipulator, then his last scene with Alma doesn't work at all.

Who has the power on today's campuses? Do the white male boys' clubs still reign, as represented by the statue of Yale founder Abraham Pierson glowering down at the students? Should we read something in the fact that the majority of these background actors are women and/or people of color (and Maggie is both)? Hank, spittle flicking out of his mouth, rants that these diverse classrooms are full of "coddled hypocrites" and yet, pointedly, we also see that he and Alma are blowhards who rarely give the kids a chance to speak. When the bravest, Katie (a small, powerful cameo from Thaddea Graham), doubts their wisdom, she gets verbally spanked.

Only at the end of "After the Hunt" do we realize it technically didn't take place today. In an epilogue, Guadagnino reveals that this happened in the fall of 2020 and that five years later, the campus has changed again. Does he think the pandemic and subsequent tumult reshuffled people's priorities? It's an interesting idea. But like everything else in the movie, it's just a scribble in the margins.

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'AFTER THE HUNT'

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

Running time: 2:19

How to watch: In theaters Oct. 10

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