In 2017, Annie Julia Wyman left academia for Hollywood—“such was (and is) the state of the job market for humanities Ph.D.s.” She went on to co-create “The Chair” for Netflix, a show about academic life at an institution where “humanities enrollments are dropping” and professors start freaking out, “clawing at each other, retrenching.” What she and her co-creator had hoped to offer was “something charming, something realish but gentle—a comedy.” Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, “After the Hunt,” treads similar ground but with a colder light. Critics have largely dismissed it for its inaccuracy and its muddled arguments. But watching it carefully, at such a perilous moment for higher education, Wyman writes, “the film—or its marketing—does itself an odd disservice by framing the narrative as a satire of campus politics or American society or online mobs or the supposed excesses of the #MeToo era. It’s too weird for that, too restless and too dark, too committed to representing its characters’ flaws and manias and melodramas and prejudices.” At its most interesting, she writes, “‘After the Hunt’ is a marvelously acted old-fashioned thing about rippingly flawed people and their pain.” It is also—“somewhat subtly, even surprisingly”—a distorted but damning portrait of how our toniest institutions exacerbate and exploit that pain. Follow the link in bio to read our Essay of the Week. 📷 Ayo Edebiri and Julia Roberts in Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt. Photo courtesy Amazon MGM Studios.