Julia Ducournau’s new film Alpha (which has just premiered in Cannes) has its fair share of blood, vomiting and death – but it’s still a strangely muted affair. At the late night press screening I attended, the walkouts seemed prompted more by weariness and ennui than squeamishness or disgust. When the French director unveiled her serial killer/body horror movie Titane two years ago, she caused a sensation and won the Palme d’Or, the festival’s main prize. This time around, there hasn’t been the same scandal or fanfare.
Alpha has some tremendous moments, but the movie is undermined by its own dense and impenetrable storytelling style. It would surely have worked far better as an immersive installation piece than as a two hour feature. Early on, a character recites from an Edgar Allan Poe poem: “all that we say or seem is but a dream within a dream.” This seems to be Ducournau’s method of signalling to us that she is not remotely interested in conventional narrative or characterisation.
On one level, this is a rite of passage story. Alpha (Mélissa Boros) is a 13-year-old enduring a germ-filled adolescence, trying but failing to make any sense of the destructive behaviour of the adults around her. Early on, we see a strange, much older man tattooing her arm. The needle piercing her skin is shown in huge and disturbing close up.
Alpha is living with her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor working in an overrun hospital. Society is in the grip of a plague. Those infected with disease are calcified. Their bodies become so brittle that if you even touch them, they will break into tiny pieces (and then, of course, the blood and organs will pour out.) When Alpha’s mother discovers her daughter’s tattoo marks, she is terrified that she has become contaminated and takes her to hospital for tests. Then Alpha’s drug addict uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim) mysteriously turns up at the family home. He is a ghostly, predatory figure whose bones protrude through his skin. Alpha wants him gone, but her mother is devoted to him and will do anything to keep him alive.
The time frame continually shifts. Without providing any context, the plot will whisk us back to when Alpha was a young child and Amin was first becoming a self-destructive junkie. As in David Lynch movies, the sense of mounting dread is heightened by the buzzes and hisses on the soundtrack.
One of the strongest parts of the film shows Alpha at school. Like Stephen King’s Carrie, she’s mocked and teased by the other kids but they’re terrified of the blood that keeps on seeping out of her tattooed arm and which they think might infect them too. In one brilliantly shot scene in the school swimming pool, she bangs her head on the side and the other pupils notice the red liquid oozing out of her and flee from her as if she’s a shark.
Ducournau is touching on some rich and intriguing themes. You can read Alpha as an allegory about the effect of Covid on adolescents. Some have claimed it’s inspired by the Aids epidemic. It’s also about broken families coping with bereavement and about the pain of first love. Actors give highly stylised performances. Rahim’s Amar lurches around as if he is on leave from a Hammer Frankenstein film. Meanwhile, Ducournau effectively evokes the feelings of panic and despair in a hospital that has too few staff and is packed with dying patients. The film is shot in dark and grungy fashion. Very little sunshine or laughter is allowed into the grim dystopian world the director is busy conjuring up.
Despite its brilliant ideas and ingenious visual flourishes, Alpha quickly suffers the same fate as all those virus victims who turn to stone. It becomes a drab and lifeless affair. Its dream-like structure is likely to leave audiences floundering too, and struggling to make any sense of what is going on.
Dir: Julia Ducournau. Starring: Mélissa Boros, Golshifteh Farahani, Tahar Rahim, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield. Cert TBC, 128 mins
‘Alpha’ is awaiting UK distribution
