Extreme French thriller Alpha turns Cannes upside down, while Denzel Washington comes out on top

Globe and Mail

20-05-2025

A mysterious virus that slowly turns its victims into marble statues, their spines and legs hardening and cracking. A timeline-hopping narrative whose twin strands majestically cross over to the mournful soundtrack of The Mercy Seat by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. And more shots of hypodermic needles being jabbed into arms and chests than an endless loop of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. These are the indelible elements that make up French filmmaker Julia Ducournau's new horror-drama Alpha, which made an explosive landing at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday night, blowing all previous competitors out of the French Riviera water.
The follow-up to Ducournau's 2021 pretzel of a body-horror movie Titane, which walked away with Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or, Alpha sent the black-tie audience inside the Palais into a polite frenzy during its world premiere.
So much so that an audience member in the balcony had to be tended to in the midst of the screening due to a medical emergency, echoing the moment when, in 2016, several moviegoers passed out during a Toronto International Film Festival screening of Ducournau's debut feature, Raw. (This time around, the moviegoer thankfully turned out to be fine, and the screening continued uninterrupted.)
At once a metaphor for the AIDS crisis and a meditation on the million little traumas that are inherited across families for generations, Alpha follows three characters in various states of distress: heroin addict Amin (Tahar Rahim), his physician sister (Golshifteh Farahani) and her troubled 13-year-old daughter Alpha (Melissa Boros), who one day comes home from a disreputable house party with a tattoo whose imprint sets off a chain of cataclysmic events.
While Titane proved that Ducournau was a devoted student of David Cronenberg, Alpha reveals the director has also been studying at the tomb of Clive Barker, especially when it comes to imagining the victims of the unnamed disease, their beautiful but tortured bodies resembling both the creatures of Nightbreed and the Cennobites of Hellraiser.
There is, to put it lightly, a lot going on inside of Alpha's apocalyptic world, not nearly all of which is digestible upon first viewing – especially one that didn't get started until close to 11 p.m. But as the crowd rose to its feet to award an emotional Ducournau a rousing standing ovation – no one needs to time these things to the minute, but it lasted far longer than any other reception at Cannes so far – it was clear that Alpha had hit a nerve.
Which, by this deep into the festival, needed to happen one way or another. While a few in-competition films have found admirers across the board, most notably the Brazilian thriller The Secret Agent, before Alpha hit the screen, there haven't been too many in-competition titles to get animated about, either on the pro or con side.
Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme, which screened Sunday night, is an emotionally empty exercise in fussiness, a steep drop-off from Asteroid City. And Egyptian director Tarik Saleh's political satire Eagles of the Republic, which screened Monday afternoon, failed to deliver on its incendiary promise of roasting Cairo's corrupt class.
Instead, the best bets as Cannes began to enter its final leg were found outside of the 'official competition' films competing for the Palme d'Or.
In the sidebar Directors' Fortnight program, Canadian director Lloyd Lee Choi delivered a knockout with his drama Lucky Lu. In his feature-length debut, the director, who was recently named the winner of this year's TIFF-CBC Films Screenwriter Award, traces a disastrous 48-hour period for a New York delivery driver (Chang Chen) as he anticipates the arrival of his wife and young daughter from overseas. A potent mix of Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and the Safdie brothers' Uncut Gems, Choi's film (not technically a Canadian title given it was produced in the U.S.) is excellent high-anxiety cinema.
Also causing heart palpitations, in a good way, was Spike Lee's out-of-competition thriller Highest 2 Lowest. An extremely loose remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1958 drama High and Low, the Denzel Washington-starring film premiered Monday just a few hours before Alpha, a nice bit of festival symmetry given that Lee's jury awarded Ducournau her Palme d'Or in 2021.
Once Lee pushed his new film's unbearably melodramatic score to the background and let Washington do what he does best – devour the screen with an unmatched ferocity – the film offered a sometimes silly but ultimately electric ride. Especially once Washington was able to pair off against hip-hop star A$AP Rocky, who plays an aspiring rapper to Washington's record-biz mogul. Alpha, meet Omega.