A college professor finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star pupil levels an accusation against one of her colleagues and a dark secret from her own past threatens to come to light.
Director Luca Guadagnino’s latest film is a psychological drama for the MeToo era. Set on the campus of Yale, Alma Olsson (Julia Roberts), a popular philosophy professor up for tenure, must face the challenge of navigating a tense situation when PhD student and friend Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri) comes forward with a sexual assault allegation that leaves her career, reputation, and her marriage hanging in the balance.
This is the third collaboration between Guadagnino and the musical score dream team of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Between this, the new TRON movie, and an ongoing nationwide Nine Inch Nails tour (which I was lucky enough to attend), I honestly don’t know where the duo finds the time to score all these projects. Though I don’t think this score will be a staple of my Spotify playlist the same way the Challengers score is.
The entire conflict serves as a metaphor for the generational divide between Gen X and Gen Z, testing the values that women from each generation are willing to fight for when their careers and reputations are on the line. Alma had a few biting insults for the younger intellectuals, especially those who come from money, but most of her observations felt trite.
With the level of talent both in front of and behind the camera, the result should be more compelling than it ultimately is. This movie may have had a greater impact had it been released in the late 2010s, rather than now. And even if it had missed its cultural moment, the issues discussed are universal, so there’s really no excuse for this film being so dull. There is so much time spent depicting mundane things in Alma’s day-to-day life that would have been best kept on the cutting room floor. And so many other scenes run on for longer than they need to that it must have been a deliberate stylistic choice by Guadagnino, I just can’t for the life of me figure out what it was.
Despite a pair of confident performances from Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri, this pretentious drama can’t make up for its glacial pace and punishing runtime.
In Theaters in New York and LA Friday, October 10th, expanding Friday, October 17th
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