Luca Guadagnino just gets it™ - After the Hunt (Review) | BFI London Film Festival 205

In 2020 there was a social reckoning - by 2022, boomers were green lighting old heads to make films about how Gen-Z are at best, misguided, and at worst, dangerous. Unable to accept a climate where they're held to a single rule they can't scurry and squirm out of, they yearned for art that solidified their worldview, so they would feel less marginalised. They did this out of fear.

There's been a lot of talk around this recently - the Conservative urge to get mad at different sizes and flavours of coffee out of fear that "Just Coffee, Black" would become some marginalised choice, and make them the marginalised they had enjoyed so many years of dunking on.

Luca took the money and ran.

In what might be my favourite take down of the concept of whitewashed!woke, Luca takes no prisoners, there are no true heroes, and no one acts rationally, and yet – and yet – all are exposed for who they are.

The kids - the kids - may know the power of accountability culture to damage, and they may be brash in their approach, but their hurt, and their instinct to justice, is not misguided. "There is no right life in the wrong world."

Older generations – hardened by a world without the internet or objective accountability mechanisms – are mad that the kids "want their student loans paid", or rather; don't want to suppress their marginalisation, rage and defilement into trauma, drinking problems, and perforated cysts.

I don't know how lucid Luca was when he took this approach, but what results is the most lucid portrait of the world we have before us, in so many beautiful and complicated ways. There's so many directions of analysis I could go in for this film that I hardly can contain myself – but I'll wait for you all to see the film first, as I'm sure it will be another discourse bomb.

The entire thesis is summed up in this one line – "The doctor said you must have been in a lot of pain; why didn't you say anything?"