After the Hunt: Julia Roberts’ Alma Illness Goes from Bad to Worse All Because of The Accusations

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In the 2025 psychological drama After the Hunt, Julia Roberts plays Alma, a Yale professor dealing with a debilitating illness. As the movie unfolds, the source of her pain becomes increasingly clear. The film, directed by Luca Guadagnino (known for Challengers), centers around a scandal involving Alma, a student, and her coworkers.

From the beginning of the film, we learn that Roberts’ professor is dealing with a lot of physical pain, which she manages with regular medication. The source of this pain, and why it worsens as the story of After the Hunt unfolds, is directly connected to the film’s central ideas and storyline.

The movie After the Hunt features Ayo Edebiri (from The Bear), Michael Stuhlbarg, and Andrew Garfield. It first showed at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, then had a theatrical release on October 10th, and is now available on Prime Video.

What Is Wrong With Julia Roberts’ Alma In ‘After the Hunt’?

The story first suggests Alma is unwell during a party she and Frederik host for their colleagues and students. We learn she’s recently returned to work after taking medical leave because of severe pain, and she relies on prescription medication to manage it throughout the course of the story.

It doesn’t take long to learn that Alma’s health problems are caused by stomach ulcers. These ulcers make her double over in pain and sometimes cause her to vomit, especially when she’s under a lot of stress. While medication helps her manage the symptoms, the pressure she faces throughout the movie continues to make her condition worse.

In the film After the Hunt, Alma is stuck in a difficult situation when a student, Maggie (Edebiri), accuses a colleague, Hank (Garfield), of assault. Hank denies the accusations to Alma, leaving her caught between their conflicting stories and unsure of what to believe.

Alma’s stomach ulcers are getting worse because she’s incredibly stressed. In a moment of desperation, she attempts to write herself a prescription for stronger pain medication using a colleague’s medical pad, but she’s caught. This leads to her being temporarily suspended from her job, which only adds to her already overwhelming stress.

As the story progresses, more secrets come to light. We learn that Alma is a survivor of sexual assault and that she had a past affair with Hank, which he tries to restart. Meanwhile, Maggie contacts Rolling Stone magazine, and they publish an article exposing how Yale University mishandled her account of events and Alma’s experiences.

The intense pressure Alma is under causes her stomach ulcers to rupture, and she ends up in the hospital. While there, she reveals a painful secret to her husband: years ago, at age fifteen, she had a relationship with an older man. When he ended things, she falsely accused him of rape, which tragically led to his suicide.

The renewed attention to Maggie and Hank’s case brought back painful memories, causing Alma significant stress and requiring hospitalization. Fortunately, the later events shown in After the Hunt reveal that Alma fully recovered and eventually became Dean at Yale.

Alma’s health problems mirror the central ideas of After the Hunt. The weight of knowing the truth and the strain of holding onto secrets are causing her anxieties, which are essentially destroying her well-being.

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2025-11-28 00:04