Alpha

In Alpha, the third feature film from French director Julia Ducournau, who already electrified the Cannes Film Festival with her shocking film Titane, the artist's bold ambition unfortunately collapses under the weight of her own aesthetic excesses and overly ambitious themes. At just over two hours long, but feeling much longer, Alpha is an exhausting experience, an overloaded and underdeveloped parable that substitutes atmosphere for meaning and style for substance. While the cast, led by the impressive trio of Mélissa Boros, Golshifteh Farahani, and Tahar Rahim, delivers convincing performances that occasionally elevate the film, the glacial pace, repetitive narration, and emotional inertia leave viewers stranded in an allegorical world that fails to resonate. The result is a film that is technically remarkable and intellectually rich in potential, but dramatically inert and spiritually empty.

The central narrative revolves around Melissa Boros as Alpha, a thirteen-year-old girl who wakes up after a party to discover a crude A tattooed on her arm, inflicted without her consent using a presumably contaminated needle. This image should have been enough to set the stage for a visceral, character-driven descent into horror, especially given Julia Ducournau's talent for bodily transformations and psychological upheaval. Yet Alpha uses this provocative act not to embark on a personal vendetta, but to descend into a heavy meditation on a fictional virus clearly intended to reflect the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. The disease turns its victims into statues, their skin calcifying into white marble, their joints breaking, their bodies crumbling to dust. A visually striking metaphor, to be sure, but one that Alpha recycles ad nauseam—and so superficially—that it quickly loses its impact, becoming a cold, abstract gimmick instead of an emotional or political revelation.

There is no shortage of ideas in Alpha—there are even too many, each vying for the viewer's attention, but none are fully explored. The film attempts to be a mother-daughter story, a metaphorical chronicle of illness and social shame, a coming-of-age tale, and a poetic requiem for a generation lost to trauma. The screenplay, co-written by Julia Ducournau, vacillates between time periods with little structural discipline or narrative clarity, introducing flashbacks without warning and layering dreams on top of memories in a way that seems to obscure rather than enrich the story. Editor Jean-Christophe Bouzy, a regular collaborator of Ducournau's, seems overwhelmed by the density of the film's fragmented timeline, resulting in a narrative pace that is not only slow but lethargic, trudging painfully from scene to scene as if dragging a marble statue behind it. The pace fails to create suspense, emotional tension, or even curiosity; in the second half of the film, the repetition of motifs and metaphors begins to resemble self-parody.

Yet amid this conceptual mess, the actors do their best to ground the film in reality. Melissa Boros, who comes into her own in this role, brings a haunting presence to Alpha: her expressions oscillate between wounded adolescence and budding rebellion, and she has an astonishing ability to appear both hardened and vulnerable, often in the same shot. Her physical presence Golshifteh Farahani, who plays Alpha's overworked mother, imbues her character with fierce intensity, capturing the panic of a mother whose love is used as a weapon by a world she no longer understands. Her relationship with Amin, the long-lost heroin-addicted brother played by Tahar Rahim, whose arrival reopens family wounds, offers flashes of genuine pathos. Tahar Rahim, unrecognizable in his emaciated appearance, delivers the film's most committed performance, expressing despair, regret, and an unstable tenderness that makes his character fascinating even when the script lets him down.

It is in its indecision about tone and its inability to stir emotion that Alpha sins most. The metaphor of the virus as a substitute for AIDS is heavy-handed and lacks the moral specificity that would give it weight. The allegory is announced in the opening scenes—dirty needles, ostracised patients, red wind sweeping through the city—and yet the film avoids engaging with the communities most affected by the AIDS epidemic. The only queer character, a teacher who hides his homosexuality, is portrayed with such a lack of agency that he seems to have been added as an afterthought. The result is a film that appropriates suffering without really examining it. Unlike Raw or Titane, where transgression revealed raw emotional truths, Alpha is too locked into its symbolic logic to ever feel authentic. The transformation into marble, while visually elegant, never transcends its metaphorical limits; it is sad but not moving, aestheticized but not touching.

Technically, Alpha is ambitious but uneven. Ruben Impens' photography bathes the film in a desaturated palette of browns, grays, and ominous blues that accentuate the hospital interiors and decaying public spaces, but also dull the screen to the point of monotony. The repeated use of music, from Nick Cave to Portishead to Beethoven, is emblematic of the film's excessive reliance on external elements to create atmosphere and depth, resulting in scenes that feel more like music videos than narrative progression. The visual effects are impressive at times, particularly the marbled victims, whose slow decay has a haunting and strange elegance, but even these eventually lose their impact due to overuse and a lack of escalation. By the time the third or fourth body disintegrates into dust, the impact is no longer poetic, but predictable.

There are a few moments where we catch a glimpse of the filmmaker Julia Ducournau that she once was: a scene where Alpha bleeds in a swimming pool while her classmates flee in disgust; a dreamlike sequence in a punk club rendered with dizzying, kaleidoscopic energy; a flashback in which Alpha traces the scars left by her uncle's needles with a marker, as if creating constellations. These images are both powerful and disturbing, evoking the physical fear and existential terror that characterized Ducournau's early work. But they are exceptions in a film that otherwise seems mired in its own aesthetic detachment. Alpha is curiously bloodless despite all the blood that flows, strangely hollow despite its grief. It seeks to evoke emotions worthy of an opera, but falls into monotony, a film composed of funeral dirges when it needed a scream.

Alpha is a failure, a film with laudable intentions and remarkable technique, but one that forgets that metaphor only has power when it is rooted in reality. Julia Ducournau remains a singular talent, and her willingness to take risks is commendable. But Alpha is the cinematic equivalent of a rough sketch mistaken for a mural, too vague in its narrative, too slow in its pace, and too enamored with its own gravity to connect with its audience. Despite the richness of the performances, it lacks momentum, coherence, and heart. A rating of 2/5 may seem harsh, but compared to the excellent Grave and the insane audacity of Titane, Alpha isn't just lagging behind, it's falling apart.

Alpha
Written and directed by Julia Ducournau
Produced by Jean des Forêts, Amelie Jacqu, Éric Altmayer, Nicolas Altmayer
Starring Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani, Mélissa Boros, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield, Louai El Amrousy
Cinematography: Ruben Impens
Edited by Jean-Christophe Bouzy
Music by Jim Williams
Production companies: Petit Film, Mandarin & Compagnie, France 3 Cinéma, Frakas Productions
Distributed by Diaphana Distribution (France), Neon (Etats-Unis)
Release dates: May 19, 2025 (Cannes), August 20, 2025 (France)
Running time: 128 minutes

Seen on June 26, 2025 at Pathé Palace, theater 1, seat P15

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