Julia Roberts in a moral thriller about #MeToo

The Italian Luca Guadagnino, director of Call me by your name, has described Witch hunt as one thriller Moral. An exercise in speculative fiction built on a disturbing enigma: what happened between a Yale University philosophy professor (Andrew Garfield, temperamental) and a well-bred African-American student (Ayo Edebiri, chameleonic) who is the partner of a trans person? Was it a consensual encounter or sexual assault? And what does a professor (Julia Roberts, all-rounder) who is the main confidant of the alleged aggressor and the mentor of the complainant have to do with all this? From this extreme situation—which invokes #MeToo, cancel culture, systemic racism, and the struggle of the LGBTI community— Witch hunt X-rays an academic universe divided between professors willing to do anything for a tenured position and students on the warpath against a retrograde model.

Thanks to his visual talent, Guadagnino transforms Witch hunt in an attractive homage to American cinema (from Hitchcock to Woody Allen) filtered through a European sensibility (a poster of The flower of my secret (by Almodóvar). Unfortunately, the script by young Nora Garrett, which appeals to the zeitgeist With omnivorous voracity, he abandons the initial intrigue and ambiguity to end up harassing the group of characters for their weaknesses and contradictions.