A year after The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s eye-popping, outlandish body horror that terrorized Cannes audiences with the no-holds-barred, blood-splattered glee of a stomping Monstro Elisasue, another French female filmmaker has taken up her mantle with an equally gory, nightmarish portrait of womanhood—and one that has proved incredibly divisive. This time, it’s Julia Ducournau, the festival’s enfant terrible, who took the International Federation of Film Critics’ prize for her cannibalism coming-of-age saga Raw in 2016, before nabbing the Palme d’Or for the deranged, girl-has-sex-with-cars thriller Titane in 2021. Now, the provocateur returns with her third contender, Alpha, a moody and then terrifying family drama that is practically restrained compared to its two predecessors—and yet it’s also a skin-crawling, stomach-turning, gasp-inducing deep dive into the abyss that will leave you shaken when you finally emerge from it.
It opens with a striking image: a five-year-old girl (Ambrine Trigo Ouaked) drawing on the arm of the man who is caring for her, using a thick marker to join together the gaping wounds which dot his flesh and turning them into a strange, queasy kind of constellation. The man is Amin (an almost skeletal, fragile Tahar Rahim), and the child is Alpha, our ill-fated heroine.
Cut to several years later, and she, now 13 and played by the captivating Mélissa Boros, isn’t faring much better. Wasted at a smoke-filled house party, we see her lying down as someone tattoos a scrawled “A” onto her arm, the needle pulsating with blood against the backdrop of the blasting music. When her doctor mother (an extraordinary Golshifteh Farahani) discovers it, as she’s cleaning up the hungover Alpha who is vomiting into the bath, she’s horrified and immediately arranges to get her daughter tested.
We learn that there’s a deadly virus making the rounds. Given the film’s ’90s aesthetics and the palpable fear around blood transmission, we assume it’s HIV, but when Ducournau finally shows her hand, it’s quite startling: in the hospital where Alpha’s mother works, patients are piling up, their skin growing pallid and then icy, until they finally turn into marble and breathe out a musky white powder. Then, they disintegrate like ash.
Alpha’s wound doesn’t heal, she tosses and turns frantically in bed, and her mother grows more panicked, though it’s still unclear whether or not she’s actually infected. That doesn’t, however, stop her classmates from turning on her, in a series of brutal sequences that will remain etched in your brain: her blood dripping onto classwork while they ostracize her; her blood caked onto a volleyball during a match that she is then told to sit out, after which the item is discreetly wrapped up and disposed of; and everyone rushing out of a swimming pool she has climbed into, in fear of contracting the disease.
Matters are complicated further by the reappearance of Rahim’s Amin—Alpha’s uncle—a desperate, ailing addict who is also infected. His sister puts him up on the floor of Alpha’s room and watches in horror as his night terrors seem to mirror Alpha’s. The latter, initially suspicious, soon warms to Amin and does what she can for him, though you can already feel this little family fraying at the seams.
It should all be a grueling slog, but it isn’t, or at least wasn’t for me. Ducournau frequently injects an unexpected, pitch-black humor into proceedings—as well as a playful and sometimes gruesome nastiness, reveling in the audience’s discomfort. We squirm when Alpha and her crush (Louai El Amrousy) make out in a bathroom stall as blood drips thickly down her arm. We grit our teeth when Amin’s sister examines his wounds and probes a little too deeply, causing a strange brown liquid to seep out of his skin. We laugh nervously when Alpha takes the needle from the doctor vaccinating her (an entirely French-speaking Emma Mackey) and thumps it into her own arm far too hard. There’s an odd sequence, too, when Amin and Alpha go on a secret night out, and she sees infected people partying in droves, presumably making the most of the time they have left.
The director keeps the concept of the illness thrillingly open: one sufferer is the partner of Alpha’s English teacher (Finnegan Oldfield), whom the kids bully because of his sexuality, once again drawing a line to the AIDS crisis; but then, the almost The Last of Us-style clouds of dust the infected exhale bring to mind our most recent pandemic, as does the climate of paranoia, as people move away from each other in crowded doctors’ offices. There’s also Alpha’s grandmother, who speaks feverishly of a “red wind,” the demon that is apparently ravaging their family. In the film’s harrowing final moments, we see this wind surrounding Alpha, her mother, and Amin.
It helps that this trio are masterful in their respective roles, too. Boros is a mercurial Alpha, hard-headed and rebellious, though just as likely to sneak out of her window in the middle of the night as she is to call for her mother and be rocked to sleep. Rahim, meanwhile, a powerhouse in everything from A Prophet to The Mauritanian, commits body and soul in a heart-wrenching, staggering turn that is deserving of serious awards attention. However, I was even more impressed by Farahani: as Alpha’s razor-sharp mother, she lights up the screen with her fierce intelligence, understanding, compassion, and all-consuming fear of potentially losing the two most important people in her life. Her bonds with both Alpha and Amin have a gentle warmth and a natural, breezy believability.
The same is true for their extended family, whom we glimpse at raucous Eid celebrations and at another point when Amin is seriously struggling. Ducournau ought to be given credit here for not only choosing actors with North African and Middle Eastern heritage for the parts of Amin and his sister—still underserved in France—but also for not treating that choice as an instance of colorblind casting. These characters speak Berber as well as French, sing traditional lullabies, and are connected to their culture in a way that makes their world feel textured and fully lived-in.
There’s a supreme confidence to everything Ducournau does here—from the title card spelling out Alpha’s name on dry, cracked earth, to the booming music and the fluidity with which the camera moves—though the film is undoubtedly let down by its final act, a muddle of time jumps that could stand to be around 15 minutes shorter.
Still, it’s a wild, fascinatingly weird, and worthwhile ride nonetheless. As to be expected with any Julia Ducournau movie, there were several walkouts in the screening I attended, countless people watching through their fingers, and, afterwards, a deluge of negative reviews. Alpha definitely isn’t for everyone, but that’s the thing about cult-classic status—you don’t achieve it without your fair share of detractors. With Alpha, Ducournau has completed quite the trifecta when it comes to portraying the horrors of being a woman, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what she does next.
