Alpha Review

Bursting onto the scene with a strong voice, a distinct style, and a fresh tale is a fantastic way to get yourself noticed. But if your follow-up repeats (or even deepens) the same beats and style, you risk pigeonholing yourself as a certain kind of director. Some are perfectly content to explore the same themes repeatedly, and can do so in unique ways: see David Cronenberg’s career-long obsession with the relationship between humans and technology. But many quickly seek a change, and garner immense backlash as a result. Ari Aster is a recent, clear example. After bursting out of the gate with two horror classics, he pivoted hard into a three hour panic attack, and followed it up with an incisive COVID Western/comedy. Aster’s success was made possible by never second guessing himself, nor feeling obligated to slide back to the genre in which he made his name.

The same cannot be said for Julia Ducournau.

Raw and Titane established her as one of the pre-eminent body horror filmmakers working today, the latter of which won her the Palme d’Or. Not content to sequester the grotesqueries to an element of the plot, the transformation of her protagonists’ bodies is a key element of their stories, which progresses in fascinating ways throughout the films, mirroring their inner journeys. Like Aster, for her third feature, she pivoted to a more dramatic story, a more personal and grounded one. But unlike the American’s swing, Alpha is not fully divorced from her prior work, weighing down its drama with an background element of body horror that informs the naked allegory but never plays a strong role in the experiences of her characters, leaving you feeling as cold as the infected.

Alpha (Mélissa Boros) is just trying to be a normal, softly rebellious thirteen-year-old. But she lives in a world where an unnamed, poorly understood disease is slowly turning people into marble statues. What they do know is that it’s transmitted by needle and sexual contact. Unfortunately for Alpha, she starts the movie by getting a tattoo from a peer using a dirty needle at a party, and she’s super interested in fooling around with Adrien (Louai El Amrousy). Meanwhile, her uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim) comes to stay with her and her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), as he’s nowhere left to go after been ostracized by the family for his heroin addiction. Following their contentious introduction, and given their parallel struggles with anxiety, perceived but unseen illness, and belonging, they become close, despite implications of some traumatic encounter in the past.

At the same time, we periodically jump back in time a few years to see Alpha’s mother (unnamed, despite getting her own subplot) caring for those afflicted by the illness, including Amin. There’s little demarcation of the jumps, save for a change in her hairstyle. But as we never see her at work in the present, and never see her outside of it in the past, that distinction is not particularly clear. Nor is its purpose, save for giving us some very basic details on the disease, and providing an opportunity for Emma Mackey to pop up as one of the ICU nurses.

When I say “present”, it should be noted that it’s 1990, as noted by a background calendar. Why 1990? Because Alpha is a basic but surreal allegory for the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Its manner of transmission, the fear and misunderstanding displayed by Alpha’s classmates that cause them to shun her, the way administrators demand a negative test if she’s to stay in school, and the complete lack of a treatment all match. Most pointedly, while waiting to get tested, Alpha encounters her English teacher (Finnegan Oldfield) and his husband, whose whole right side is marble. If there was any question of relation, he spits at her “Do you think it’s weird to see your teacher kiss another man?” It emphasizes that everyone we get to know who’s afflicted is either homosexual or a needle user, playing off the public’s moralistic dismissal of HIV/AIDS in the 80s and early 90s.

That bluntness, aggressively underscoring what was already plainly obvious from the rest of the scene, characterizes most of the screenplay. We spend a lot of time watching the kids at school bully Alpha for something related to her tattoo wound or their fear of her being contagious. When at home, it’s full of scenes intended to draw a thick line connecting her experience to Amin’s, which in turn ensures you cannot miss the HIV/AIDS connection. How else are you to interpret it when he brings her to a club full of people in unorthodox dress partying, many of whom have some stage of the illness?

For all the time and effort put into making sure you cannot miss her intent, you really want her to say something about it, or at least to dive into this reality with some specificity. She could highlight some element the broader public doesn’t consider, or focus in on the surreal horror of the disease’s progression, or deeply consider how Amin’s experience is impacting the family. Instead, there are some gestures towards all of them, but the main comment is “Man, that sure was crazy and upsetting, huh?” There’s some thread of modern vs. traditional medicine, and loss of childhood innocence, but they’re quickly lost in the maelstrom.

The stuff that works best is the building relationship between Alpha and Amin. They could not be more different, but their experiences are similar, despite the uncertainty of Alpha’s health and her ignorance of Amin’s (she knows he’s a drug addict, but we learn of his illness long before she does). Rahim especially shines, bringing a detached but certain humanity to this character who’s a wreck, and knows he’s a wreck, but is doing all he can. You feel every moment of his inner pain, such that even some of his more reckless behavior is understandable, if not excused. It very effectively puts behind him the disaster for which he’s best known, and hopefully puts his career back on the right track.

Despite the messy slog that comes before, it all builds to two very effective scenes of closure, involving the resolution of mother and daughter both putting a fine point on their relationship with Amin. They’re visually and narratively striking, finally rationalizing Ducournau’s approach. It’s as if she started with these ideas, and worked backwards from there. But as satisfying as the ending is, it cannot make up for the two hours of story that precede it, which struggles to engage, and offers few insights or entertainments or novel presentations. They do reassure us that Ducournau hasn’t entirely lost it, making the case that she remains a director worth paying attention to, even if we’re not going to get a body horror masterpiece every time.