Luca Guadagnino is one of the finest directors working today. With huge hits like Challengers and Call Me By Your Name, he has hardly put a foot wrong since he burst onto the scene. It’s such an almighty shame, then, that his new drama After the Hunt is the worst English-language film he’s made and a complete bore to watch.

Alma (Julia Roberts), a philosophy professor at Yale University, is shocked when her top PhD student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), tells her that she was raped by Alma’s colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield). With Hank offering his version of events and Maggie her own, Alma finds herself caught in the middle. Meanwhile, revelations about her past emerge that starkly resemble Maggie’s situation.

Julia Roberts is an iconic actor, a ’90s box office star with an Oscar to her name. We are now at a different stage in her career than we were 20 years ago; it’s a slower and more selective range of projects, but it seems like each of her new endeavours is accompanied by a script so poor that it completely negates her ability to deliver an excellent performance. Between her two most recent projects, After the Hunt and Leave the World Behind, there are two films with a strong premise and a star-studded cast, but the script itself is consistently terrible and overly long. It doesn’t matter that Guadagnino is a brilliant director when working with a narrative that is so incredibly tedious, and there’s nothing the actors can do to lift it either.

Garfield feels very miscast; his performance did not convince me that he is someone whose nature it is to do and say these things. Edebiri does not have the dramatic onscreen presence to carry a story of such serious subject matter. Michael Stuhlbarg does not get to do enough in this, and neither does Chloe Sevigny. It is a waste of such a brilliant cast that they should have to play such uptight and unlikable intellectuals, a film where everyone is convinced they’re the smartest people in the room (I imagine people do feel and act this way at Yale University, though).

For some bizarre reason, the cinematography in After the Hunt is atrocious. Each and every scene is deliberately under-lit to make each room as dark as possible, which might work well in a controlled cinema but looks awful on the TV through Amazon Prime. There was a point where I had to check my TV hadn’t switched itself off because it was that pitch black. I understand the goal is to create a moody psychological thriller atmosphere, but if you can’t see what’s happening on screen, then it’s pointless. Additionally, the score by the Nine Inch Nails duo Ross and Reznor, whose work I usually adore, did not match the film and often felt jarring and confusing.

It’s a real shame this year’s Guadagnino film is such a letdown, the biggest disappointment he’s had since leaving Italy. I know he’ll be back next year with another compelling drama; I just hope he regains the high level of production quality we’ve come to expect from the director of modern classics like Bones and All and Suspiria.