Julia Ducournau means well. After winning the Palme d’Or for “Titane” in 2021, the French filmmaker decided to lean away from the more sensationalist aspects of that film—perhaps not so coincidentally, also the ones that dominated headlines about it—and into the cracked family melodrama of its second half. In interviews, the writer-director describes her latest, “Alpha,” as an attempt to revive discussions about the stigma surrounding AIDS in the 1980s and ‘90s, with the intention of confronting, and thus beginning to heal, that trauma. This is admirable and empathetic. Unfortunately, however, on an artistic level, it’s also deeply misjudged.
At times, “Alpha” plays like a Cronenbergian after-school special, in which the visual metaphors are overplayed, and the drama is broadly sketched to teach a moral lesson. Alpha (Mélissa Boros) is mistreated by her classmates, who fear her because they don’t understand what she’s going through. Easy enough, right? But there’s a disconnect here. “Alpha” isn’t aimed at contemporary young people, but their counterparts from 30 or 40 years ago, creating the impression that Ducournau is nobly combating misinformation that few people believe in anymore.
“Alpha” is set in the ‘90s, the decade in which Ducournau came of age; this is good to know going in, as the filmmaking is frustratingly vague on this point. The only real tell is the fear and prejudice aimed at the film’s marginalized characters, which is exactly the same as the way societies around the world collectively mishandled HIV and AIDS in the first decades of that epidemic. Sympathetic but tone-deaf sequences involving Alpha’s English teacher, whose partner is dying of the disease, seem airlifted out of an early AIDS drama like “Longtime Companion.” Again, the intention here is to address a past harm, but it comes across more like an anachronism.
Ducournau’s film is also centered around a blood-borne pathogen, which is communicable through sharing needles or sexual activity or contact with infected bodily fluids—but not, as some of the characters believe, through a toilet seat. The main difference is that Ducournau’s epidemic doesn’t make a person waste away into nothing. It turns them to stone: First comes coughing up a bit of dust, then stiffness in the limbs, then finally a pearlescent tone to the skin that means death is imminent.
The film’s structure and editing both compound these issues. The film opens with a viscerally stylized sequence in which Alpha gets a crude stick-and-poke tattoo that will drive at least part of the plot; it’s a classic Julia Ducournau party scene, lit in intense shades of purple and yellow and populated by strung-out partygoers nodding off between bouts of hedonism. Ducournau is very good at producing shock and intrigue with sequences like this one, and it works here as well. From there, however, she shifts downwards into something grimmer, muddier, and more earnest.
Most of “Alpha” revolves around her relationship with her unnamed physician mother (Golshifteh Farahani) and her uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim), whose drug addiction has strained his relationship with the rest of the family. When Amin comes home to kick heroin, he moves into Alpha’s room, where something—sympathetic hypochondria, maybe? Or does she have it?—prompts her to start shaking and sweating as well. Meanwhile, her mother’s overprotectiveness is giving Alpha panic attacks, which makes it even less clear why she would lock Alpha in her room with Amin, forcing the 13-year-old to observe opioid withdrawal unsupervised and up close.
This is indirectly addressed later, as the past and present collide and the narrative as we know it collapses into a hurricane of montage. It works as an immersive descent into our young protagonist’s confusion, but while leaving the audience with questions can be provocative; in this film, it’s hard to tell what those questions are supposed to be. A well-intentioned but shallow thematic thread involving the family’s Berber origins adds little beyond another (admittedly striking) visual metaphor, and by the end, “Alpha” leaves the viewer with a visceral experience in search of a coherent framework.
A rare moment of clarity comes when Alpha breaks down, tearfully crying to her mother that she’s “too young” to grapple with such heavy adult concerns. She is, and her mom realizes this in a flash of guilt that’s immediately followed by pure love. She pulls her daughter close to her, and they lie together in Alpha’s bed, taking refuge in each other as the chaotic world turns ever faster around them. It’s a moment of respite, both for the characters and for the audience. It’s also the only time when Ducournau’s stated intention of provoking empathy for the marginalized and misunderstood actually translates onto the screen.
