Steel Magnolias. Or not? Hedda and After the Hunt.
Anyone who hasn’t yet seen Hedda or After the Hunt may be startled by how often the two films seem to glance at each other across the aisle.
And yet, for all the echoes, Nia DaCosta’s youthful Hedda is a genuinely deft refashioning of Ibsen, while After the Hunt, for all its provocative subject matter, barely manages to raise an eyebrow in the audience.
Both films are crisply written and handsomely directed; neither quite achieves greatness, though it’s hard to pin down why. Perhaps it’s the directors’ near-herculean restraint—their adamant refusal to judge their heroines. Perhaps it’s the lush, lacquered settings, more reminiscent of a luxury-car ad than an emotional furnace. Either way, something fails to ignite, despite the magnetic women at the center, played respectively by Tessa Thompson and Julia Roberts.
Both films are high-strung dramas sprinkled with the occasional, well-earned laugh. Their heroines expend heroic energy trying to present their worst selves—only to become, perversely, ever more captivating in the process.
Hedda gives us a proud, modern gold-digger whose future rests precariously on marriage and the mansion she’s acquired along with it.
After the Hunt wades into the moral undertow of #MeToo—or at least gestures toward its stickier questions. What separates the two films is less important than what binds them: Hedda excavates the condition of womanhood in the UK during the 1950s, while Roberts’s character in After the Hunt pointedly asks whether we should believe a woman’s word regardless of the fallout.
Both dramas simmer with political intent and stir up more than a few uneasy questions about women, power, and the ever-elusive “feminine” in American life.
Neither film skimps on its director’s personal feminist commitments. Should a woman always do the “right” thing? Why? Are women not as gloriously, catastrophically human as men? And when a woman acts purely in her own interest, must she be judged—and by whose lens? Both films sketch a ruthless, exclusionary society, particularly within the academy, that seems designed to eject women from its hallowed halls.
Woody Allen’s neurotics have evolved into something sleeker and more ambitious, propelled not only by ideas but by careerism and cold, hard cash.
In this post-Weinstein era, portraying a complicated—even unflattering—female protagonist might be the most feminist act a director can commit.
Careers and money, after all, are not moral qualities, and we’ve grown too cynical to pretend otherwise. It’s no wonder Hedda and Alma compel our sympathy even as they bewail their misfortunes and their shaky credibility. Not every woman has someone on hand to rationalize her choices, to shelter her when night falls—and this vulnerability, this insistence on needing someone, becomes oddly endearing. They forget, of course, that they helped build the very pedestal on which their men now stand.
The antagonists—played with gusto by Nina Hoss and Ayo Edebiri—might have been more intriguing had they not veered into caricature, all trembling neediness and frantic bids for attention. The privileged woman and the alcoholic inching down her own Sunset Boulevard act mostly as mirrors for the protagonists. Still, one can imagine both characters blazing through their own spinoffs, staging righteous coups against the filmmakers who rendered them so cruelly.
After the Hunt and Hedda rank among the most interesting studio offerings of 2025, even if neither is boldly experimental.
Both attempt to supply the psychological heft their scripts occasionally lack. We root for Hedda and Alma, no question, but a haze of ambiguity lingers throughout both films.
A woman, as Hedda reminds us, can never outrun the judgments shaped by appearances. After the Hunt shows a world in which appearance not only dominates but never sleeps. The explanation is depressingly simple: privilege remains privilege, unmoved by gender, unmoved by the moral mission universities claim to uphold. In the end, privilege rules—and little else does.