Four years after Julia Ducournau won the Palme d’Or with her jaw-dropping body horror car sex drama “Titane,” the filmmaker is back on the Cannes Croisette with her “Alpha.”
Ducournau’s third feature which, like “Titane,” will be distributed by Neon, centers on a titular teen whose life is upended after a mysterious decision. The film‘s official logline reads: “Alpha (Mélissa Boros) is a troubled 13 year old who lives with her single mom (Golshifteh Farahani). Their world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm.” Tahar Rahim, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield, and Louai El Amrousy star.
“Alpha” is premiering in competition at Cannes, with Ducournau being one of seven female directors with new films in the main competition. Kelly Reichardt will also launch “The Mastermind,” while Mascha Schilinski has “Sound of Falling,” Lynne Ramsay has “Die My Love,” along with Hafsia Herzi’s “La Petite Dernière,” Chie Hayakawa’s “Renoir,” and Carla Simón’s “Romeria.”
While it’s unclear yet if “Alpha” will thematically tie to Ducournau’s earlier feature films “Raw” and “Titane,” the filmmaker told IndieWire in 2021 that she does enjoy having “small Easter eggs” across her filmography. However, she added to Vanity Fair in 2025, “I realized that I was saying something I’d already said in my two previous films. I got bored with it — and annoyed with myself for allowing myself to stay in that comfort zone. From film to film, I always feel like I can go further in the way I expose myself, which is incredibly hard to do.”
Ducournau continued, “With each film, I’m thinking that I can put myself in a more vulnerable place, in order to relate to the audience more and more,” she says. “And I’m not done digging. It’s an eternal path: How can I be more sincere? How can I get closer to my emotions? How can I show them in a more precise way, with more generosity? To me, that is the only path. That’s why I make films.”
Ducournau previously announced an A24 TV series in the works in addition to “Alpha”; IndieWire can confirm the project is still in the works.
Neon will premiere “Alpha” in theaters this fall. Check out the teaser below.
