Whilst director Julia Ducournau has made just three features to date (taking roughly a decade to do so), it’s a case of quality over quantity. Any minor quibbles with her work aside, the films she’s produced so far have offered intriguing takes on what could, in other hands, be quite simplistic body horrors. But in her hands, her style of world-building has made her films into something more complex and satisfying. This is a preface to wondering what in the hell was eating the critics at Cannes this year: what exactly is it about Alpha (2025) that has triggered such a dismissive, even scathing response from so many of them? As much as the new film is less tethered to a linear narrative style than its predecessors, it’s in many other respects another rock-solid Ducournau feature: an interesting and outlandish vision, laser-focused on a physicality which links the ick to something more profound, using sensitive characterisation to explore a hyperreal version of modern(ish) France. So far, so Ducournau. But what it most certainly isn’t is Titane all over again, which seems to have aggrieved a few people. Or, perhaps its exploration of addiction and disease is too much, both a bit too close to home and a bit too much of a fantasy to hit the right notes. Whatever; calling the film ‘drab’, ‘cowardly’ or even ‘a turkey’ seem like oddly disproportionate responses to a film which unfolds so many of its ideas superbly well. Perhaps those free seats were a bit lumpy this year.
When the film starts, we encounter a much younger version of Alpha than the teenager we stick with for most of the rest of the film. As a five year old (Ambrine Trigo Ouaked), which is how she appears in the very first scene, Alpha seems to be in the care of an intravenous drug user. Innocently, she has taken a marker pen and she’s joining up his track marks like they’re a map: he, whoever he is – though we could perhaps infer he’s a relative, because how in the name of god else? – lets her do this, though struggling not to nod out as she does. When he tells her, ‘I’ve caught something,’ it’s our first hint that his physical condition could be hiding something more ominous. But in this part of the film, it’s a double meaning: he opens his fist to reveal a ladybird, traditionally symbolic of resilience. The little girl squeals with delight as she takes it from him; the ladybird motif will recur throughout the rest of the film, with a poster of a ladybird hanging on Alpha’s bedroom wall, in a room which becomes first a contested space, then a space for an unlikely reunion and the formation of a strange, formative bond.
Perhaps it’s on some level due to her early exposure to drug use, or perhaps it’s just due to the vicissitudes of being a teenager, but when we next pick up with Alpha (now played by Mélissa Boros), she’s whacked out of her mind at a house party: whatever has put her in this hole, it’s probably something more than cheap cider. She gets tattooed by someone who probably hasn’t passed an environmental health qualification: surrounded by squalor, using a needle and a punctured ink cartridge, the nameless tattooist handpicks a large letter ‘A’ into the child’s arm. Alpha lets him do his thing, ink and blood running out of her arm in rivulets. This scarlet letter is of course still there when her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) is at hand to help clean her up when she gets home. She’s horrified: as a medic, she is well aware that there’s a new, fatal bloodborne infection doing the rounds. She deals with it every day. I don’t know if anyone has mentioned the similarity to the ‘stone men’ from Game of Thrones, but in Alpha, the new disease does something similar – turning its victims into beautiful marble. It’s fatal, but along the way, it makes people into strange works of art, ‘like Apollo’, as Alpha innocently describes someone later in the film. Maman insists that her daughter gets tested for the infection right away, as well as vaccinated against tetanus and other precautions we might recognise.
Steadily, the world of the film unfolds as a nearly-France, or France’s shadow perhaps: in some respects it seems modern, but in others, either entirely timeless, or more recognisably anchored to a point in time a few decades ago. If this was France exactly, then we might be a little surprised by how dishevelled everything seems to be. Hospitals groan under the strain of a new epidemic; nurses and doctors provide all the care they can, but bafflingly, without taking adequate steps to safeguard themselves from the infection, like some sort of version of medieval healthcare, part practice and part faith-based. Elsewhere, Alpha’s school is in a state of functional disrepair, with her only lessons seeming to comprise physical education, or snippets of Edgar Allan Poe, whose ‘dream within a dream’ message is disrupted by some casual student homophobia and a failure to appreciate the poem’s chimerical message. Perhaps this is Ducournau, acknowledging how more worldly concerns may impact upon the type of world-building she’s doing here. Or, perhaps it’s simply there to establish the school’s combative environment. As soon as the other students catch a glimpse of Alpha’s suppurating, swollen arm, which with the amount of Phys Ed going on, they inevitably do, they begin to actively ostracise her, believing her to be a carrier for the new infection.
This withdrawn and already alienated girl then has a new problem. Arriving home one day, she’s horrified to find what she at first believes to be an intruder. Actually, it’s the man once tasked with looking after her. This is her mother’s brother, Uncle Amin (Tahar Ramin, who lost 20kg to play this role, close to what Christian Bale went through to star in The Machinist). Alpha had forgotten him; she’s now scared to death of him. Her mother’s love for her brother has perhaps overridden her common sense, as she’s decided Amin can sleep in Alpha’s room while he detoxes and gets his life together; as above, it’d have to be a relative to get these types of special dispensations, as most parents wouldn’t particularly want a rattling addict sweating it out on their thirteen year old daughter’s floor, but the love between brother and sister is one of the film’s most unshakeable, even if irrational threads, something which pulls the entire two-hour film together, uniting two separate timelines, a then and a now which combine to impact upon Alpha, shifting her forward into young adulthood.
But a strange thing happens; the more Alpha is made to come to terms with the possibility that she, despite her attested youth, may be carrying an infection which will kill her, the more sympathy she begins to feel for the dissolute, complex Amin, who is able to offer her the kinds of coming-of-age blowouts she seems to need as well as a new, dark, pithy respect for living and dying on one’s own terms. He’s also in many respects her guide to understanding the flawed but resolute nature of unconditional love: whatever else is in store for her, we see very clearly that the film’s journey is part of her by the time the end credits roll. If the film is offering a magical realist spin on the AIDS epidemic (with its rampant accompanying homophobia) and on the more recent global pandemic (with its own panic and unreason, as well as devastating loss), then it’s also looking in a more complex way at the nature of that loss, offering a world where people become their own memorial monuments, where junkies with their wounded veins and emaciated limbs, or ostracised queer people who are unable to kiss their partners in public, transform into something ghastly – but timeless.
You might not ultimately be able to ‘grasp/Them with a tighter clasp’, but the relationship between the living and the dead is transformed here, as is the whole coming of age saga as we might know it. On the outskirts of all of this, there are generational and cultural differences to sift: a little girl unable to speak to her Berber kin, a family riven by addiction, milestones obscured by pitfalls. It’s imaginative, provocative stuff, and if it eschews narrative conventions just too much for some audiences, then so be it: there’s more than enough here, in terms of themes, script and performances, to render Alpha one of the most immersive and provocative films of the year.
Alpha (2025) was the closing film at this year’s Celluloid Screams.