If there is a truth that holds firm beneath the wickedly slippery surfaces of Luca Guadagnino’s movies, it’s that presentation counts. No sartorial decision is made lightly, and no design element is arrived at by accident. The opening titles of his new drama, “After the Hunt,” should have you on high alert. They’re elegantly rendered in what looks to be Windsor Light Condensed, widely recognizable as Woody Allen’s onscreen typeface of choice. A Thad Jones jazz standard on the soundtrack more or less confirms that we’re watching a borderline trollish act of homage. Are we about to enter an enclave of attractive, privileged, hopelessly self-involved intellectuals, as in so many Allen movies? Or will Guadagnino’s art imitate Allen’s life, with a tale of grim allegations, firm denials, and he-said-she-said dialectics?

Yes, to all of the above. “After the Hunt” revolves around Alma Imhoff, a professor in the philosophy department at Yale, where the talk is neither light nor condensed. She is played by Julia Roberts, who, you may recall, was a nineteen-fifties art-history instructor in “Mona Lisa Smile” (2003), pushing conservative-minded Wellesley women toward self-realization. Alma, a creature of our times, offers a pricklier kind of feminist inspiration: she’s formidable, aloof, feared, and adored. I counted one unguarded outburst of laughter, when Alma, unwinding over drinks with a colleague, lets out the signature full-throated Roberts cackle, but it felt like a boozy anomaly—a stray glimmer of warmth from a woman who knows that scholarly authority is best served cold. Striding into a classroom, she has only to utter the words “Foucault’s panopticon” to reduce us all to teacher’s pets, eagerly leaning forward in our seats.

At a dinner party she hosts with her psychoanalyst husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), Alma is no less in her element. Resplendent in Veronica Lake curls, and softly lighted against handsome wood panelling, she draws the attention of everyone in sight. The flirty blowhard with the goatee is a younger philosophy professor, Hank (Andrew Garfield), who signals their years of friendship (and maybe more) by propping his legs up against her on the couch. Seated nearby is Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a doctoral candidate rumored to be brilliant, though all we can discern, watching her fidget, is an anxious yearning for Alma’s approval (and maybe more). The party chatter is thick with high-flown intellectualism, cross-generational sniping, and intra-department rivalry, none of which anyone could or should mistake for plausible academia-speak. The screenwriter, Nora Garrett, has achieved an amusingly florid Hollywood simulacrum—one that tilts into knowing parody—of an intensely self-regarding world. The more irritating the characters get, the more compelling the movie becomes.

It’s the fall of 2019, with #MeToo still ascendant and the rollback of D.E.I. and other reactionary assaults on social justice still far in the future. But “After the Hunt” doesn’t feel dated; as its title implies, it’s a period piece and it knows it. (An epilogue set in early 2025 makes this pointedly and poignantly clear.) The effect is to infuse the story with an undeniable and knowing nostalgia; how quaint, at Alma’s party, to find everyone debating matters of representational consequence. Will Alma earn tenure before Hank, a guest noxiously suggests, simply because she isn’t a straight, white, cisgender male? How will the progressive winds of the present affect the teaching of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, and other problematic geniuses of the past?

Beneath such rhetorical feints, Garrett sets an intricate trap for characters and viewers alike. Alma returns home one evening to find Maggie waiting outside with a look of wild anguish and a terrible experience to recount. After the party, she says, Hank walked her back to her apartment, came up for a nightcap, and, against her protests, drunkenly assaulted her. “He crossed the line,” Maggie insists, and something in her phrasing sounds a warning bell, as if she were describing not the trauma of a sexual violation but a meticulously recorded breach of moral protocol. Edebiri, wide-eyed and almost wraithlike, seems to have been directed to act as if she were lying—and lying badly. Maggie asks for Alma’s support, but what we hear sounds less like a cry for help than like a test of loyalty. Alma, responding with more questions than sympathy, fails it utterly.

Have we in the audience also failed Maggie if we find her unpersuasive? Well, no: she’s a fictional character, and, as Alma peevishly points out during a seminar, fictional characters don’t need to be coddled; they’re there to be scrutinized, analyzed, and, if need be, torn down. Guadagnino encourages our doubts, shooting Maggie in exaggerated horror-movie closeups set to the doomy bass notes and shrieking winds of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score. The idea of Maggie’s untrustworthiness has already been planted in an early scene, mid-party, involving a bathroom cabinet and a hidden envelope conveniently filled with old news clippings concerning dark secrets in Alma’s past. Maggie is a snoop—and a clumsy one. (She rifles through the clippings at such length that I assumed she was scanning for coupons.) She’s also emblematic of a story in which nothing and no one can be trusted.

Nearly every frame of “After the Hunt” spins a glossy lie, and not just because the film, though set in New Haven, was shot in London. It’s a posh Ivy League whodunnit and a cinematic Rorschach blot, cleverly rigged to generate cascading waves of suspicion. Hank, desperate for Alma’s ear, claims that he had confronted Maggie with evidence of plagiarism on her part, and that her rape accusation is purely retaliatory. But what of the toxicity, the ill-disguised capacity for sexual aggression, lurking beneath his oily charm? None of it helps his case, though it does broaden Garfield’s range. As an actor whose most famous roles include a conscientious objector, a Jesuit priest, and Spider-Man, he seems liberated to be playing the part of an out-and-out sleaze.