After blowing us away with her cannibalism coming-of-age debut Raw and the car-fucking whirlwind that was Titane, a follow-up that even swept up the Palme d’Or in its wake, French auteur Julia Ducournau overthinks it with a bloviating, 1980s-set family drama that’s tinged with sci-fi elements but fails to strike for the heart.
Ducournau’s films already have a rep for causing extreme reactions – Raw’s premiere famously had audience members fainting – and sure enough, someone was stretchered out of the Cannes screening of Alpha.
It’s harder to know what caused the health scare this time. Sure, the needle-phobic will find the opening shot, of 13-year-old free spirit Alpha (Mélissa Boros) getting a bloody ‘A’ carved into her arm while baked at a school friend’s party, a lot to stomach – and needles are never far from the frame in a film that imagines an Aids-like virus rife among the sexually active and drug users.
In a twist that owes something to Greek mythology and something to Cronenberg, sufferers gradually turn to marble, breathing frost and crumbling to dust like alabaster statues in an ancient land. No wonder, then, doctor mum (Extraction’s Golshifteh Farahani) is worried sick that her daughter has contracted the virus from a dirty tattooist’s needle.
Sadly, Ducournau’s latest hand grenade is a dud
That striking visual detail aside, Alpha represents a disappointing gear-change for Ducournau that casts a compassionate eye on the loving, angry chaos of family dynamics – Alpha, her mum and junkie uncle (Tahir Rahim, another level of hunched and wiry) – but never settles on where it wants to take them. There’s a lot of themes packed in here: folk traditions versus modern medicine; the AIDS panic and homophobia (ill-served via a sketchy subplot involving a gay teacher); growing up and letting go. To add to the soupy dramatics, there are twin timelines and deviations into dream logic, neither of which add clarity to this strange, singular vision.
A film full of slammed doors, Alpha probably works best as an exploration of personal boundaries – about how a viral panic like the AIDS crisis (and Covid, though this is not a Covid movie) crank up prejudices, leaving personal freedoms suddenly perceived as threats by others.
There’s a lot of suffering here, but few of the thrills of Ducournau’s previous work. Sadly, her latest potential hand grenade is a dud.
Alpha premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.