THE STORY – Alpha, a troubled 13-year-old lives with her single mom. Their world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm.
THE CAST – Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani, Mélissa Boros, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield & Louai El Amrousy
THE TEAM – Julia Ducournau (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 128 Minutes
A storm of red dust swirls around the camera lens. We push into what appears to be cracks in the crusty, barren earth itself. The cracks begin to expand and form the title of Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s latest, “Alpha.” The camera dives into the crack, and we emerge from what appear to be track marks on Amin’s (a heartbreakingly fragile Tahar Rahim) arm. He shares a tender moment with his niece Alpha (Mélissa Boros) as he reveals a ladybug he caught earlier. In some cultures, ladybugs are believed to bring good fortune and prosperity, but none of that is present here in Ducournau’s overwhelmingly depressing third feature film. While “Raw” and “Titane” focused more on the body horror genre for their characters’ journeys, “Alpha” takes a far more expansive approach, cramming an obvious allegory for the AIDS epidemic, a family melodrama, a coming-of-age story and more into a single package. It’s overstuffed with too many ideas, and as a result, each one suffers as much as the characters and, by extension, the audience.
Set in contemporary France yet haunted by the AIDS epidemic, the story revolves around 13‑year‑old Alpha, who lives with her devoted single mother, Maman (Golshifteh Farahani), who works at the local hospital, and her uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim). Their already unstable home life fractures the day Alpha returns home from a party with a jagged “A” tattoo carved into her arm. Ducournau lingers in extreme closeup on the needle puncturing her soft flesh, an unnerving prelude to the more grotesque horrors that follow. While Maman works at the overrun hospital (alongside Emma Mackey in a thankless role as a nurse), a deadly new virus, nicknamed the Red Wind, sweeps through the wards, killing off many by the day. The victims’ skin turns white, their veins spiderwebbing under the skin before their bodies harden, crumble, and collapse into dust. Amin, Alpha’s uncle and surrogate father figure, is in the late stages: Ducournau shows Rahim’s back covered in calcifying lesions as Maman scrapes away debris in a scene that is queasy and a good showcase for the film’s makeup and visual effects. The special effects work is persuasive throughout (including a scene involving Alpha’s ceiling threatening to crush her during one of many dream sequences). Still, one can’t shake the feeling that the director has pulled her punches in a film courting extremity. Outside her home, Alpha clings to everyday teenage concerns, such as her tentative romance with fellow classmate Adrien (Louai El Amrousy) and the bullying she’s experiencing from other girls at school. Does she really have the virus?
Ducournau is never content with a single narrative, and here, her maximalist intuitions finally start to show cracks of their own. Told in an overwrought structure with alternating timelines, it’s tough to follow any kind of an emotional throughline, especially when that is most of what “Alpha” is hinging on to be a success. Amin’s inevitably terminal journey, Maman’s grim shifts at the hospital, and Alpha’s adolescence, each never fully delivering on their initial setups and following an erratic tempo that drains momentum from the film rather than building cumulative dread towards its finale. The metaphor for the AIDS crisis, through spilled blood, shared needles, and sexual awakening, could’ve been profound and emotionally resonant. There could’ve even been a more direct tie to the COVID-19 pandemic (some of that imagery sometimes comes through, whether intentional or not). Still, the screenplay presents every parallel and story arc so bluntly, aided in no small part by the film’s oppressively bleak atmosphere and style, that the audience is left struggling to connect the dots as the narrative starts to fall apart.
While the plot is a jumbled mess of too many ideas and cinematographer Ruben Impens opts for a desaturated high‑contrast digital look that sucks away all the warmth from the frame in what is truly a hideous color grade, the performances, at least, offer some form of relief not to make this already disappointing film a complete waste of time. Farahani grounds the film with weary compassion for her daughter and brother, who are powerless to stop their bodies from decaying due to an invisible enemy. Boros is mightily impressive as Alpha, delivering a raw and honest vulnerability that occasionally lifts the script’s woes and gives the film a solid enough character to follow through this otherwise tedious journey. And Rahim delivers one of his best performances yet, peeling away layers of himself, literally and figuratively, to extreme physical lengths that will simultaneously horrify you and break your heart.
One can catch glimpses of the filmmaker who once shocked Cannes with a serial killer having sex with a car throughout “Alpha,” but the focus of her vision this time around remains too scattershot. Julia Ducournau remains a singular, fearless voice in contemporary cinema, but “Alpha” is the first real misfire of her career. It’s conceptually daring yet dramatically inert (which is surprising given how much the overly dramatic score and emotionally grueling performances are working to communicate otherwise), as it desires to be personal in scope for this particular family but also monumental for countless lives that have been lost to the AIDS epidemic. In the New Testament Book of Revelation, God says, “I am Alpha and Omega,” meaning that he is the beginning and end of all things. As we question if Alpha has the virus or not, we start to wonder if she will be the beginning of a cure, a representation of the ladybug featured at the beginning of the movie. Or, is this the end of all things as we know it? It’s that sense of totality Ducournau is reaching for but, sadly, never quite fully grasps.
