Christopher Rhoten
French director Julia Ducournau is an uncompromising filmmaker, and her new body horror Alpha is her least conventional yet. That is an exciting claim for the director of the cannibalistic coming-of-age Raw and the bizarre Titane, which famously features lovemaking between a woman and a car. But her latest film’s polarizing festival reception speaks for itself. While another visceral experiment, fans may spend most of their time with Alpha feeling a little bored.
The setup is ripe for terror: rebellious 14-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) receives a tattoo at a party that quickly becomes infected. The girl’s mother (Golshifteh Farahani), left unnamed, becomes certain her daughter has contracted a recently discovered disease that is turning people into statuesque marble (the origin of which we see in a parallel story). As the rumors spread and Alpha begins to be bullied at school, she experiences surreal panic attacks, made worse by the arrival of skeletal junkie uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim), who is suffering from heroin withdrawal.
While characteristically bold, Ducournau’s sophomore feature mixes subjective storytelling with a confusing structure. The result is a strangely torpid and lifeless “dream within a dream,” as one character says. Ducournau has stated that she spent half the time writing this film as she did on her other movies, and while it feels cruel to suggest that was a mistake, all gems require sufficient polishing.
Rarely does a movie gift-wrap its controversial nature into a single element, but Alpha’s fatal flaw is unambiguously its screenplay. The two stories cross over in a way that is unintuitive and difficult to parse on a first viewing, muddied further by a twist that tells us everything we’ve just seen didn’t quite happen how we thought. It makes for a tedious conclusion to an already tedious watch. Even before we’re sucked out of the story to be told how to feel, Alpha’s recurring attempts to defend herself at school and get along with her uncle are narratively, emotionally, and visually inert thanks to repetitive dialogue and increasingly blatant metaphors. Ruben Impens’s flat and washed-out cinematography is a clever attempt to reflect the anhedonia of its characters, but viewers still have to, you know, watch it.
It is during the second half of the film, when Ducournau focuses more on the mysterious disease, that one would hope her elegy might paradoxically come alive. Alpha’s mother sees the hospital where she works overrun with patients who cough up gray smoke and whose skin slowly transforms into shiny plaster. Compared to Titane’s transhumanistic transcendence, Alpha presents a more dismal view of the human condition. There is a fantastic scene in which Alpha and Amin visit a nightclub filled with victims in various stages of transformation. The silver patrons dance their last days away as their marbled feet stomp the ground, the comparatively tiny Alpha looking up at them in wonder and fear.
This obvious allegory to AIDS is an intriguing attempt to venerate the sick and ailing; beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder. But it also winds up strangely detached from the rest of the story, which is more about the effects drug abuse has on others. You shouldn’t expect the apocalyptic element to be fully felt, nor should you expect Ducournau’s ‘body horror’ to mine very many frights from this vexing condition—save for one excruciating shot that will have you clutching your ribcage in appreciation of its presence.
Conceptually, there is plenty of potential here. If Ducournau is aiming for a Cronenbergian Requiem for a Dream, the film does briefly evoke that same sense of profound loss in its devastating conclusion. Instead of someone being literally marked for judgment, Alpha’s most interesting idea is how concern for a person can change how you see them, and if you’ve managed to make sense of the ending, perhaps it will resonate. Holding on to the husk of a loved one after they’re already gone is a horror that no one should experience. But the film’s sister idea—that such an attitude can prohibit the living, too—seems a bit silly in a world where getting a stick-and-poke tattoo puts you at risk for the shiny zombie disease that’s going around.
Alpha has some impressively physical performances and will likely improve on a rewatch, but the placid experience of a first viewing cannot be ignored. In any case, Ducournau will no doubt have her share of defenders, and the Palme d’Or winner will no doubt be back with another stylish piece of provocation that the French refuse to let die.
