People are saying this is the best script through the first half of 2024. Are they right?
Genre: Adult Thriller
Premise: A Yale professor up for tenure must navigate a rape accusation from her most cherished student against another professor, who happens to be her best friend at the school.
About: Challengers director, Luca Guadagnino, is directing this. He’s got Julia Roberts starring in the lead and Andrew Garfield playing the disgraced professor. This script has been bouncing around town lately and the word on the street is that it’s amazing.
Writer: Nora Garrett
Details: 106 pages
I love the smell of a supposedly great script in the morning.
I’m too eager to build up some exciting intro so I’m just going to jump into it!
40-something Swedish-American, Alma Olsson, has been working every second of her life in the US to get to the point where she’s at now: she’s about to be the youngest tenured professor in Yale history.
She only has one contender, which is her good friend, Henrik, a man she has much admiration for as he seems to have everything going for him: looks and intelligence.
We meet the two during a dinner at Alma’s house, along with her husband, the nearly invisible Frederik, and a group of her most prized students. The standout student is a young mouse-like girl named Maggie. Maggie is OBSESSED with Alma. She lives to impress her and all the other students hate the teacher’s pet relationship they have but there’s nothing they can do about it.
The rumor is that Maggie’s put together the best dissertation of the last 20 years at Yale. She’s only days away from showing it to Alma and the electricity in the air is palpable. That night, as everyone’s heading home, Alma is concerned that Maggie is walking home alone but Maggie assures her that Henrik will walk her.
The next morning, at school, Maggie approaches Alma with a look on her face that tells Alma her life is about to change. When they’re away from others, Maggie says that when Henrik walked her home, he came in, they had another drink, and then he raped her. Maggie wants to report this IMMEDIATELY and is surprised when Alma isn’t supportive. She tells Maggie that she believes her but that proving these things is tricky and doing so may be more trouble than it’s worth.
The next day, Henrik comes to her with a different story. He says that he read Maggie’s dissertation and found it to be almost entirely plagiarised. When he brought this up to her, she freaked out, he went home, and the next morning he woke up to these false rape allegations.
Henrik brings up to Alma that things are about to get messy and, not to “worry,” because he “won’t tell anyone” about their affair. This puts Alma in an unwinnable position. The smart move is to privately and publicly support Maggie, who has started to tell people in positions of power about the rape. But she believes Henrik’s version of the story. Plus, if she goes against him, he could hurt her. So, what does she do?
Things escalate when Henrik gets fired but just when it looks like Alma is in the clear, articles begin popping up online where Maggie has named her as a professor who “wasn’t supportive” and “didn’t believe” her story. Alma will have to save her name as well as keep a long-held secret from her past from coming out, a secret she suspects Maggie may have dug up.
Since Luca’s last movie was about tennis, I’m going to use a tennis analogy to start off here.
When I competed, one of the biggest flexes you could attain was a double-bagel win. That’s when you win 6-0, 6-0. You’re so good, your opponent doesn’t even manage a game. And it looked so sweet up there on the draw. It showed your name “def” the other player, and below it 6-0, 6-0. It had the added benefit of your next opponent seeing that score and being intimidated. They knew that they were in for trouble.
Now, winning 6-0, 6-0 didn’t happen often. For that reason, in those matches where you were up 6-0, 4-0 or 6-0, 5-0, you started to get a little nervous.
You would get clumsy. You would miss easy shots. You would double-fault. The next thing you knew, your opponent had won a couple of games. You’d still end up winning. But the difference between 6-0, 6-0 and 6-0, 6-2 may as well have been the difference between winning the Olympic 40 yard dash and winning your local schoolyard race. It wasn’t the same.
That’s what happened today with After the Hunt. This is a really good script. In fact, I would agree with the town’s excitement and confirm that it’s the best script of 2024 so far. It will probably finish on top of the 2024 Black List.
But it was so close to being genius. It was so close to that double bagel, I could taste it! If not for those two sprayed backhands and that mishit second serve, we could be talking about an all-time classic.
The first thing that stood out to me was that every single character in this script had something interesting going on with them. It’s RARE that I encounter that. Alma is one of the most complex characters I’ve read in years. With her complicated marriage and infidelity and secret past and physical ailments and single-minded desire to get tenure, even if it meant allowing her sexually assaulted star pupil to suffer… there was SO MUCH GOING ON with this character. Roberts will be front and center in the Oscar race once again when this movie comes out.
Maggie comes off as this weak star-struck scaredy-cat but then, when her entire academic career is potentially put in question, she turns into a killer. You’ve got Henrik, who’s both smart and handsome and Alma’s rival and also lover and he also disputes Maggie’s story. Is he telling the truth?
Even Frederik, who exists mostly in the background, represents the ultimate “nice guy” who does everything right and it’s for those very reasons that his wife has lost respect for him. There’s this moment in the script that perfectly encapsulates their marriage. After she has a rough night drinking, she wakes up the next morning and we get this description: “She puts her phone down, sees that Frederik left her two Advil and a glass of water. Something about this nice gesture angers Alma. She leaves the Advil where they are.”
But the moment I knew this script was heads and tails above 99.9% of the scripts out there (that percentage is not hyperbole by the way), was the moment when Henrik comes to Alma to tell his side of the story and, in the process, reveals that he won’t bring up “their past” – in other words, that they used to sleep together.
This created a scenario that I advocate to every screenwriter who will listen, which is: Put your hero in the most difficult situation you can come up with for them.
What’s more difficult than being told by your star pupil that she’s been raped and that the rapist is your co-worker who you have an on-again off-again secret romance with? When you throw potential tenure in there, you realize just how complicated Alma’s situation is. She believes her friend (Henrik) more than the student. But it’s better optics if she supports her student over her friend. But if she supports the student, her friend may reveal their relationship, which would end her marriage and lose her tenure.
I’ll read another 500 scripts before I encounter another scenario this clever, this thoughtful, this compelling.
So why didn’t it get the genius status? I don’t want to spoil too much so I’ll speak in generalities. This is a classic example of sticking around after the party is over. There is no reason – and I mean NO REASON – for the last 10 pages of this script to exist. You wrote something so good and then you limp to the finish line. Why????
Frustrating.
But it’s a testament to how good this script is that, despite that, it’s still an “impressive,” and it still makes my Top 25. Wow!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive (TOP 25!)
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t forget to pick up my dialogue book! Here’s a great dialogue tip from the script. Put a substantial amount of effort into making your characters speak differently from one another. It’s a great visual way to distinguish who’s who, purely through dialogue. Henrik is really smart. So, when he talks, he uses analogies, he quotes high-brow authors. Those are the unique things he does so that, even if we didn’t see that it’s Henrik speaking, we still know it’s him because those are things that only HE does.
