Alpha (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is French director Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to 2021’s titanic Titane, the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner that still has us wondering if its protagonist did, indeed, have intercourse with an automobile. Ducournau’s provocative visuals inevitably draw comparison to David Cronenberg’s groundbreaking fetishy body-horror indulgences – and she’s very much aware of that. She was therefore prompted to push herself from her safe zone, and crafted an AIDS allegory with flashes of her trademark eye-widening imagery. And the result is, well, more baffling than compelling.
ALPHA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We open on extreme closeups of wounded skin – classic Ducournau. First, five-year-old Alpha (Ambrine Trigo Ouaked) plays connect-the-dots with the track marks on her uncle Amin’s (Tahar Rahim) arm, and it looks like a constellation in the night sky. Eight years later, Alpha (Melissa Boros) is stoned at a party and not quite mentally present when a boy holds a needle over a flame, dips it in ink and tattoos a large “A” on her shoulder. Later, Alpha’s still spaced out and puking in the tub at home when her doctor mother (Golshifteh Farahani), whose name we never learn, sees the tattoo and flips out. Not in the stereotypical my-baby-is-scarred-now manner of a 1990s parent, mind you – in this quasi-past/maybe-future/surely-alternate reality that mostly resembles our own, a bloodborne illness is killing countless people, who transmit it via dirty needles and sexual activity.
Mom sees it every day at the hospital: Rooms full of ailing patients, left to go hungry by nurses who illogically fear being infected by merely breathing the same air. The illness, also unnamed, initially manifests as a cough so dry, dust literally poofs from people’s mouths. Then their skin hardens, cracks and dries out, eventually developing a glossy sheen resembling marble. And then they flatline. So Mom has good reason for losing her shit, and promptly shuttling Alpha to the hospital for testing. While they wait for the results, Alpha is ostracized at school, her judgmental and cruel peers treating her like a leper. She bumps the volleyball and gets blood on it, and everyone freaks out. The boy she’s been kissing, Adrien (Louai El Amrousy), fears he’s been infected too. The girl who’s Adrien’s actual girlfriend tries to drown Alpha in swim class, who bumps her head on the side and watches the pool empty, Caddyshack style, as a cloud of blood plumes around her.
At this point, Uncle Alim moves in with Alpha and mom. He’s addicted to heroin and apparently in the early stages of the virus. His frequent overdosing manifests as a traumatic cycle of him nodding off and Mom breathlessly performing CPR to revive him. For reasons beyond our understanding, Mom sets up a sleeping bag for Alim on the floor of Alpha’s room; later, almost as inexplicably, she locks the door from the outside so Alpha’s forced to comfort Alim as he convulses from withdrawal. Is Alpha sick, too? Physically? Psychologically? Hard to tell. Mom takes Alpha to the clinic, where she runs into her teacher (Finnegan Oldfield) and his virus-stricken partner; Mom also examines her daughter regularly, and Ducournau’s camera all but uses Alpha’s uvula as a speed bag. This surreal nightmare sort of almost intensifies into a Nick Cave video (needle drop: “The Mercy Seat,” solo with piano), and a lot of confusion. A whole lot of confusion.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? I was similarly underwhelmed by Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, but I’d still recommend it to astute audiences – unlike the frustrating Alpha.
Performance Worth Watching: Boros is more than capable of carrying the load here, displaying significant screen presence and an impressive range of emotion, despite the screenplay’s inability to give us a properly defined character.
Sex And Skin: Brief bits of teenage groping and makeout sessions.
Our Take: Ducournau has clearly calculated Alpha to be disorienting, a hellish fever dream-style narrative reminiscing not at all fondly on the fear-driven narratives of the height of the AIDS epidemic. The allegory is plain and obvious in its parallels, cloaked only in the grotesque beauty of the glossy polished-marble bodies that end up bagged and tossed on gurneys, lining the hospital hallways. (Uncle Alim’s struggles with addiction ultimately feel superfluous, a poorly defined subplot.) But the narrative itself is straight-up incomprehensible, the screenplay rendering it nigh-impossible to discern flashbacks from present-day events, hallucinations and nightmares. It shouldn’t be this difficult to connect with Alpha and her mother, but Ducournau keeps them in a hazy survival-mode emotional state that never comes into focus as an existential quandary or a series of personal hurdles to overcome.
Granted, we shouldn’t be watching movies expecting to have our hands held while navigating the challenging portions. But Alpha lacks the clarity of, say, Lynch or Cronenberg, who use intuition and mystique to compel us to hang with their insane visions. Ducournau never orients us to her story’s physical space or on the narrative timeline, leaning on her bizarre, ugly, beautiful and/or oppressive imagery to carry us through. Yet she dials back on the shock elements – possibly to counteract expectations wrought by the searing Titane – until the film becomes a bleary mess of imagery, symbolism, metaphor and other quasi-literary elements resulting in a puzzle movie that’s all middle pieces of roughly the same color, and no edge pieces to form a framework.
Our Call: Alpha is ambitious, but still a disappointment. SKIP IT. (We’re still here for Ducournau’s next film, though.)
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.