ALPHA

(Check out Savina Petkova’s Alpha movie review. The film just had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)

“Too much love sometimes makes people crazy,” says the despondent heroin addict Amin (Tahar Rahim) to his 13 year old niece Alpha (Mélissa Boros) towards the end of Julia Ducournau’s newest film Alpha, and his line echoes through her previous works, Raw and Titane. Alpha, the French filmmaker’s follow-up to her Palme d’Or winning body horror/transhumanist allegory, also revolves around a family, pecking at the symbolic power of blood ties to create and destroy one’s life. The scope of Ducournau’s third feature is even bigger than Titane’s, switching between 1982 and 1990 to paint a picture of a world in dismay, set off by an unknown virus which erodes people’s bodies in a very stunning way: by turning them into marble.

Alpha tells its story through textures, juggling solid and liquid matter: on the one hand, there is the threat of being ‘marbleized’ by the disease, and on the other hand, blood and tears flow freely to a disturbing degree. At the film’s beginning, Alpha comes back from a party with a fresh tattoo on her arm (a big ‘A’), and her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), who is a doctor, urgently requests tetanus shots and a test. A test for what, Alpha asks, and her question drowns in a shameful silence that already reveals the illness as a broad metaphor for AIDS. As they wait for the results, the wound refuses to heal and Alpha soon becomes ostracized; at the same time, her mother refuses to let her take days off, even when her daughter pleads with her to stay home.

Home is a rotten place though, and Ducournau’s script makes sure the characters return to it again and again – physically and mentally as well. Flashbacks and present time scenes reveal more about the extended family, particularly the brother-sister relationship with Amin, and the passivity of Alpha’s grandmother who time and time again refuses to acknowledge Amin’s illness. We meet him as a junkie before we learn he was sick and the film wants us to think about him as the former rather than a victim. Heroin injections and overdoses are so frequently shown in Alpha, to the point that even the most benevolent viewer would run out of empathy by the end.

Between its dystopian, criss-crossing plot and the harshly enforced atmosphere of decay, the film ends up leaving its emotionally-driven characters stranded. Alpha’s mother, for example, is so completely defined by her guilt and savior complex, that there is little left for the audience to latch onto: one moment she is berating her daughter and being overly protective, and in the next we see her neglectful and acerbic. Amin’s character is equally tragic, with even less background, but at least his role as a mediator between mother and daughter shines in a couple of wordless, yet very moving sequences shared with his niece alone. That said, the film’s visuals never seem to catch up with that emotional flow and remain painstakingly obvious: a warmer hue marks the flashback scenes, while present times are overlit and overexposed with such strong fluorescent lighting that skin of every color looks ash-white.

Julia Ducournau is at her best when she follows the compulsions of her characters, even when they lead them to the very limit of human bodily experiences and taboos. With Alpha, she allows herself to be overtly social with the themes of fear and alienation related to AIDS, but at the cost of the human beings on screen. Truly, the pans and close-ups of those marble bodies are striking and not easy to forget, but the hot-blooded, warm engagement with feelings is lacking. Hinting at ambivalences has never been Durournau’s thing, so it’s quite surprising to see Alpha stopping short of those radical conclusions about the unconditional maternal or paternal love that fuelled both Raw and Titane. At best, Alpha is as dry as the marble dust left of those who didn’t make it.

– Savina Petkova (@SavinaPetkova)

2025 Cannes Film Festival; Julia Ducournau; Alpha

Liked it? Take a second to support Hammer to Nail on Patreon!