Julia Ducournau’s intimacy with body horror, or pushing the human form to grotesque limits, may have originated in her medical-adjacent background (both her parents were doctors). But stacking on that is her visual creativity and desire to find the invisible thread between two people, which bestows Ducournau a trusting voice in this genre. Though there’s nothing wrong with the fearmongering schlock that makes you rethink about piercings, Ducournau goes the extra step to hold your hand as normalcy transmogrifies into brutal conditions. That’s what makes Raw and Titane powerful vehicles for emotional catharsis. Among the pain and disgust within us, we can still yearn for closeness and somehow find it in the darkness.
As her previous works dig deep past ripped flesh, Ducournau’s third feature Alpha feels like a reflective pause before the kill. If it were based on a piece of personal history, it arrives to us with the utmost respect to the corporeal condition which, despite the punishment it undergoes, belongs to a being that feels. Named after the titular character (played by Mélissa Boros), the film follows our teenager’s descent into social ostracization following a shared-needle exposure to a mysterious infection. Alpha’s fear is extrapolated from her peers’ plain horror and her physician mother’s (Golshifteh Farahani) experience, who has seen the height of the infection’s pandemic and personally from her heroin-addicted brother Amin (Tahar Rahim). Alpha gets serotested and the results couldn’t come back any faster.
Within the first-half hour or so, it seems clears that the infection is an allegory to the AIDS epidemic. Other bloodborne infections could also fit within the infection’s viral mechanisms, but there are very few public health crises that share the stigma that pervades the film’s environment. Initially, I watched this film in confusion: why bother creating a fictionalized infection that all but resembles HIV, which is very much still a real thing? But this might be the choice that separates Ducournau from colleagues with the same vision of horror-ifying medical conditions. Even with good intentions, the message may be clouded with grandiose presentation. Instead of attempting to replicate Kaposi sarcoma, Alpha’s victims of the infection display hardened silvery skin that spread. In their final moments, they start shattering into dust. Sure, that’s not a medically defined symptom anywhere in the textbooks, but its metaphorical effect is tastefully devastating.
Alpha traces the rise and fall of AIDS epidemic with similar emotional and historical arcs, but some of the film’s surrealistic tinges recall the kind of nightmarish tone that Ducournau can create with ease. Within hallucinatory scenery of red sandstorms, our three characters remain the focus. Alpha’s mother (unnamed, but wildly important in the stoicism needed for this story) comes to us worn to the bone, never quite fully relaxed from the beginning but especially when Amin reappears in their lives. His presence feels like the writhing elephant in the room: acknowledged in his woeful conditions and yet not fully realized for the life that is about to disappear. Rahim’s performance especially holds the infection’s ugly manifestation with a surprising boyishness that reminds me of what an older Leo Fitzpatrick smirking would look like. It’s especially befitting as his health declines to residual childlike helplessness, while Alpha loses her innocence.
The film isn’t neatly contained or gratifying like Ducournau’s other works, which can be part of the larger dissatisfaction once the credits roll. But it doesn’t feel right to say that it’s not as good when its deliberate choices veer this film’s impact away from bloodthirsty satisfaction or hackneyed historical productions. Wherever place in her heart Alpha traveled from, it’s enough to know Ducournau’s tenderness can be more compelling than gory infliction.
Alpha
2025
dir. Julia Ducournau
122 min.
Now playing @ AMC Boston Common
