Julia Ducournau has insisted that genre “imposed a distance” on her first two features, but to watch her third — the dour and dismal “Alpha,” which eschews the more legible body horror of her earlier work in favor of a comparatively grounded AIDS allegory — is to appreciate that genre wasn’t a wedge between emotions in “Raw” and “Titane” so much as it was a conduit for them. Depriving herself of that same channel as she plunges headlong into the most loaded material of her career so far, Ducournau struggles to find another mode of expression that might be able to take its place.
Regrettably, “Alpha” is just a few minutes old before that struggle begins to seem futile, as the opening scenes are so helplessly adrift within a cold gray sea of unformed feeling that the rest of the film can only do its best to tread water. The only surprise is that it takes the better part of an hour for one of the characters to almost drown.
Ostensibly as keyed into its title character’s emotional growth as the director’s previous films were to their heroines’ physical transformations, “Alpha” starts with the first of its many grave mistakes. The world is overrun with a bloodborne virus that its scientists have yet to understand, and yet 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) — for reasons that are never compellingly articulated — decides to get a massive “A” tattooed on her arm at a Portishead-soundtracked house party where all of the kids are sharing the same dirty needle. The film’s incoherent timeline will later suggest that the virus has already been ravaging France for several years by this point, which only raises more questions about Alpha’s choice of body art. Was this an uncharacteristic display of rebellion, or was it the first expression of a self-destructive streak that was seeded within her as a child?
Ducournau will hint at the answer in an exasperatingly roundabout manner, but it’s safe to say that Alpha’s motivation is of little interest to her unnamed single mother (Golshifteh Farahani), who works as a doctor at the local hospital and spends her days watching infected strangers petrify into marble-like statues as their skin hardens and their coughs emit plumes of clay sand. The virus’ symptoms are meant to evoke the holiness of recumbent effigies, but most of the victims more closely resemble the guy from “Beastly.”
Will Alpha soon join their ranks? She has to wait two weeks for her test results (pour one out for Emma Mackey, flexing her French in a thankless role as the nurse who facilitates the examination), but that’s an eternity for a junior high school kid who was already plenty anxious about boys before she had to deal with the possibility of turning one of them into a perfectly sculpted Alex Pettyfer look-alike. As a fellow critic mused to me after the screening: “I don’t know if we need a cool aesthetic stand-in for AIDS.”
Perhaps Ducournau’s case might have been more compelling if “Alpha” had done more — or anything — to anchor the virus in something deeper than its surface-level symbolism, but the movie so consistently obfuscates the epidemic into an atemporal hodgepodge of anguish and acceptance that I soon began to question whether it was even real within the context of this story.
To that point, “Alpha” is on much firmer ground when illustrating the fear that spreads alongside the virus than it was pushing against it. Alpha’s ostracization at school is, like so much in this film, diffused across a constellation of unengaging targets in the hopes that one of them might leave an impression (see: Finnegan Oldfield as a gay teacher who sticks around just long enough to recite some Edgar Allen Poe and cry), but a handful of them do. One scene in the school pool does a particularly wicked job of emphasizing Ducournau’s strengths, as the director makes a visceral, bloody spectacle of Alpha’s social pariah status.
The girl’s own fear is similarly palpable when her uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim) shows up in her apartment after an eight-year absence. Hunched, jittery, and deep in the depths of heroin withdrawal, Amin’s unannounced presence terrifies his niece, who doesn’t remember using a marker to connect the dots between the track marks on his arm when she was little.
As Alpha begins to suspect that she’s dying of the virus, her paranoia starts to mirror the symptoms of Amin’s drug use, though Ducournau — in pursuit of a pure feeling that she can’t pin down — mostly chooses to illustrate this kinship through a series of flashbacks to Alpha’s childhood. Clear enough at first, and then increasingly unstuck in space-time to a degree that undercuts the film’s emotional primacy, these glimpses into the past give Rahim a chance to do more than just be a warm presence and writhe around in pain, but conflating his drug use with the effects of the virus dulls any interest in them both.
While bouncier hair and a slightly brighter color scheme help to distinguish between the story’s then and now, the difference is only so noticeable in a drama this sterile and desaturated; a film that conveys its reactionary self-isolation through the drabness of a Roy Andersson comedy, but feels like it’s had the life sucked out of even its most “joyous” moments (only an unhelpful montage soundtracked to “The Mercy Seat” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds manages to qualify for that category). The slipstream of it all is slippery enough to suggest that Ducournau’s nightmare might in fact be “a dream within a dream,” but the director’s efforts to snap out of it and rage against the moral conservatism the virus has inspired only serve to emphasize the film’s disconnection from itself.
Who is Alpha, beyond a self-destructive kid who wants to break free from her mother, and how does the generational trauma she’s inherited from her immigrant grandmother — a trauma vaguely tinged by the difficulties of assimilation — allow the virus to serve as a cure for the fear that it breeds? It’s hard to say, and even harder to hear, as Boros and Farahani alike are both lost beneath the film’s booming electronic score whenever they aren’t being smothered by mix-and-match dialogue about love and abandonment.
“This family doesn’t do boundaries,” Amin says at one point, and “Alpha” is so eager to weaponize that tendency against a world that’s become afraid of itself that Ducournau effectively blurs all of her ideas into a flavorless sludge. Indeed, the movie only comes alive when it leans into the heightened sort of spectacle that Ducournau regards as an impediment, as it does in the vividly expressive scene where a character’s spine crumbles into a pillar of sand, and in a final sequence that — at long last — offers a meaningful illustration of the hurt that these characters have been holding for so long instead of each other.
Somehow overwrought and undercooked all at once, “Alpha” doesn’t have the slightest grip on what it means to be 13 years old in a world that’s storming with tragedy on all sides, but Ducournau implicitly understands that no one is ever old enough to bear the burdens unto which they are born. The maddening frustration of her first unambiguous misfire — which is worse than bad because it could have been good — is that it feels so much, but conveys so little.
Grade: D+
“Alpha” premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters this October.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.
