‘Alpha’ review: Julia Ducournau's ‘Titane’ follow-up is set against a mysterious French plague

Dir/scr: Julie Ducornau. France. 2025. 128mins

Julie Ducornau is filled with surprises. Together with her first two options, Uncooked and Titane, she established herself as one in every of Europe’s most unique new directing abilities. Titane, which scooped the Palme d’Or in 2021, was a physique horror which had a narrative about households nestling someplace in its viscera. Alpha turns the components inside out, centering a household drama in opposition to the background of an unnamed plague that carefully resembles the AIDS epidemic.

An emotional coronary heart beneath a veneer of horror-tinged style parts

Bodily transformation and laceration are on no account absent, however they serve to tease out and layer the emotion. Alpha is teeming with concepts, even when not all of them mesh in a narrative that makes use of some old-school auditory persuasions to attempt to win us round. Whereas Titane was a critically lauded and much-awarded arthouse style film that didn’t fairly stay as much as its field workplace potential, Alpha might go in the wrong way. Its boldness is probably extra commercially viable, with Ducornau focusing on an emotional coronary heart  beneath a veneer of horror-tinged style parts. 

Set throughout two time frames in  the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties – the connection between which can progressively be revealed – that is primarily the story of a fatherless 13-year-old lady named Alpha, performed with presence and assurance by relative newcomer Melissa Boros. Alpha is dealing with the stuff all insecure teenagers undergo, nevertheless it’s made worse by the truth that she might have caught one thing from an newbie tattooist’s needle, and by the arrival of the emaciated man who turns up someday within the flat she shares together with her mom, a hospital physician (Golshifteh Farahani). He’s mum’s lengthy estranged heroin addict brother, and actor Tahar Rahim goes by way of an unbelievable bodily transformation – solely a part of which could be ascribed to make-up – to catch an addict’s curvature, his hungry look, his veer between aching desperation and chilled-out affability. 

The Rahim-Boros pairing supplies a few of Alpha’s most affecting moments, wherein hazard and tenderness alternate and coexist. This younger lady comes from a Berber household dwelling in France, but she has by no means discovered the language her mom and uncle use after they don’t need her to know. This and a reference to a supposed Berber people perception in a ‘purple wind’ that steals the soul – figured in a putting closing scene set in a bland, boxy housing property – is one other theme thrown in to an already heady combine.

When the story that she may be contaminated spreads round faculty, Alpha is bullied and ostracised. The punishment she takes is expressed bodily within the ugly anarchist-style ‘A’ tattoo etched into her arm at a celebration, by the blood-test jabs her mom sends her to have, by seeping wounds and a nasty head harm within the faculty swimming pool. There’s a properly intimate aspect to Ducornau’s urge to dig beneath the flesh right here, a ‘comfortable physique horror’ simulacrum of the hormonal adjustments this adolescent lady goes by way of.

Alpha does have one very putting particular results card to play: the epidemic that options within the movie, which is blood-borne and impacts homosexuals and drug customers, makes its victims progressively harden and switch to marble and their breath emerge as frost. Watching this transformation in motion is fascinating. With its allusion to classical statuary and Greek myths of metamorphosis, it seems like an ennobling tribute to those that usually died reviled and rejected. But it surely’s additionally a flashy speaking level tacked on to a narrative that may have misplaced nothing with out it.