She’s only made three movies, but Julia Ducournau has already built her own cinematic festival of female suffering and endurance, focusing on women plagued by peculiar conditions. In Raw, the heroine seemed perfectly normal until she was overcome with a genetic craving that compelled her to eat her sister’s severed finger. Her challenges were trivial compared to the lead in Titane, a murderess whose automotive copulations slowly transformed her internal fluids into motor oil. Next to her, the tribulations of Alpha, the 13-year-old girl at the center of Ducournau’s eponymous new whatsit, are relatively prosaic; she just got a tattoo via a dirty needle and may have become infected with a strange virus. This quickly proves to be the least of her problems.
Having seen all of Ducournau’s features, I’m not sure that I’ve properly understood any of them. This is, mostly, a compliment. Aesthetically speaking, the French provocateur is a gifted and fearless stylist, using robust techniques and bold aural and visual flourishes. Intellectually, her works tend to be ambitious and enigmatic, probing thorny ideas but refusing to neatly spell out their themes. This can be vexing, but the inherent tension—the collision between muscular filmmaking and knotty storytelling—is also enveloping. You enjoy getting lost in the labyrinth.
Again, mostly. Alpha is simultaneously Ducournau’s most conventional and confounding film to date, and its warring impulses are frustrating as well as seductive. The swirling dust clouds that beset its seaside location are a bit too metaphorically apt, given the movie’s tendency to crumble and obscure. But the solidity of its director’s craftsmanship is less prone to disintegration.
You know whose bearing is far less sturdy? Alpha’s uncle, Amin (Tahar Rahim), a skeletal heroin junkie whose lopsided smile is most often deployed in service of getting his next fix. We first meet him in the past, when a much younger Alpha is lovingly using a Sharpie to link the track marks on his arm—a rough version of connect-the-dots played out on human skin. It’s a startling introductory image, both tender and haunting, and one that Ducournau will return to later—or maybe earlier, given her penchant for collapsing timelines.
Amin’s addiction feeds into one of the movie’s main subjects: communicable illness and the panic surrounding it. Given its lack of cell phones and its use of boxy overheard projectors, Alpha is presumably set in the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was in full frenzy. But the virus that preoccupies Alpha’s mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor credited only as Maman, is more mysterious; its victims slowly morph into polished stone, their faces and limbs gradually calcifying as if they keep sneaking peeks at Medusa. Maman worries that Alpha, played as a teenager with unnerving poise by Mélissa Boros, and freshly sporting a jagged “A” on her left tricep, has contracted the disease—a fear that’s soon transmitted, as though airborne, to the rest of the neighborhood.
For a chunk of its runtime, Alpha operates as a bullying picture, not unlike the recent summer-camp-from-hell nightmare The Plague. Alpha’s classmates exhibit the kind of boorish behavior typical of teenagers, mocking a gay teacher (“You sound faggy”) and shunning anyone who strays from the orthodoxy. Alpha, who is carrying on a clandestine relationship with a boy called Adrien (a name that keeps popping up in the Ducournau-verse), immediately becomes the target of their scorn, inculcating in her a mix of resentment, helplessness, and self-loathing.
This is unpleasant material, but it also allows Ducournau to showcase her talent for delivering standout sequences. There’s a terrific set piece in the school swimming pool where Alpha, wrestling with a peer, smacks her own head against the wall (reader, I yelped), causing her fellow students to scramble for ostensible safety as her red blood mingles with the chlorine—an inky pathogen spreading inexorably through the water. That type of terribly beautiful shot is nothing new for Ducournau, but there’s something wondrous about the related scene where Alpha spies her teacher’s boyfriend in the hospital and turns his perceived stigmatization on its head, countering his anger with kindness. And that same duality—the anticipated anguish offset by surprising compassion—attends the moment when Amin starts tweaking in Alpha’s bedroom and they ultimately cling together in a desperate embrace, the bombastic swells of Jim Williams’ score underlining their shared grief and comfort.
All of this involves physical stress, and Alpha is very much a work of body horror. (The scene where Maman examines Amin’s deteriorating back is one of ghastly suspense—a chilling amalgam of blood, bone, and ash.) But Ducournau isn’t just commenting on the frailty of the human form or the stain of societal contempt. She is also… well, I’m not entirely sure what she’s doing. Beyond castigating the healthcare industry (Emma Mackey improbably shows up as a beleaguered nurse), Alpha flirts with science-fiction, considering a mythological menace called the Red Wind and maybe even trafficking in time travel. It transpires over two seemingly distinct periods—as with Saoirse Ronan in Little Women, Farahani’s changing hairstyles provide a helpful clue as to where and when we are—but its separate eras eventually begin to fuse, most notably during a sequence on a bus where characters brush across their past and present selves.
I confess that during Alpha’s third act, my lizard brain craved greater understanding, chafing against the screenplay’s ambiguity. This doesn’t nullify the movie’s pleasures, but it does dilute some of its emotional power. Its final scenes, while vividly conceived, produce questions that are as puzzling as they are tantalizing.
And yet, even if it isn’t a coherent piece of storytelling. Alpha remains rewarding as a product of estimable craft and mighty ambition. It defies obvious explanation or classification, and while that makes it challenging to parse, it also makes it easy to sink into. The best way to appreciate this flawed, intriguing movie is to surrender to it. Or to quote the Tame Impala banger that soundtracks one of its hypnotic flurries of activity: Let it happen.
Grade: B
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.