22-05-2025
Alpha review - I'm defending gruelling French body horror that inspired walkouts
There's been a surprising amount of backlash to one of the front-runners at Cannes this year for the festival's top prize – but I liked Alpha.
The divisive movie, which inspired some walkouts this year, is the latest from French filmmaker Julia Ducournau, known for her boundary-pushing work in the body horror space with the likes of Raw and Titane.
I must admit that I felt really uncomfortable watching it – but that, to me, was the point of the film.
Alpha is gruelling but also thought-provoking, set in an alternate version of the recent past where society exists under the shadow of a deadly blood-borne disease which slowly turns those suffering with it into marble.
That's the expected body horror element of the movie, which is often weird and unsettling, although things do move more into coming-of-age drama territory thanks to Alpha's genre-bending.
The film follows the titular Alpha (a stunningly raw Mélissa Boris), a troubled 13-year-old who comes home from a party with an 'A' tattooed on her arm.
Her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) frantically questions her about the needle used as it's revealed she is a doctor working at an overstretched hospital, struggling to cope with the onslaught of patients succumbing to this suffocating sickness.
The movie is a clear, pretty unsubtle, AIDS epidemic allegory, especially with how Alpha is shunned at school by her classmates, who are terrified of her blood – although it also rings true of Covid in more recent years with its familiar panic and scenes of crowded hospital rooms.
There's also a hacking cough to boot, as those affected by this unnamed affliction cough up dust.
Rampant homophobia is also on display in a literature class run by Alpha's English teacher (Finnegan Oldfield), who is later revealed to be in a relationship with a man dying of the disease.
Alpha is more pared back than past Durcournau films in terms of its grotesque body horror, but it's still present and used to wince-inducing effect – just in smaller doses.
In one horrific scene in particular, I almost gagged as one victim of the virus was shown in agony, body splintering.
Another grim moment is the swab of a mouth, filmed in unpleasant detail. These sorts of shots are interspersed throughout the film, but Ducournau's focus is much more on making you feel the emotional drama as a priority over generating still-visceral physical reactions.
But this film is not as taboo breaking as her previous work, centering instead on the sometimes fraught relationship between Alpha and her mother, which is put under further strain when her junkie uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim) moves back in.
Alpha was previously left in his care as a young girl when he overdosed, something he does consistently throughout the film, always being brought back to life by his determined sister. While she cut off contact with him due to the incident when Alpha was younger, she seems surprisingly fine with it now.
Another slightly confusing element is the matter of the mysterious red dust coating the outside world – something Alpha's grandmother is worried by, but is oddly never commented upon by anyone else or linked to the disease. Is it the remains of those statue-like victims once they disintegrate? Or is it just to offer another element to the apocalyptic vibes of the film?
However, the urgent mood which Ducournau and her actors set – including Emma Mackey as a nurse colleague of Alpha's mother – allowed me to not become distracted by the slightly vague aspects of the film, concentrating instead on the deep emotion it provoked.
For those not in Alpha's thrall, there were a few walkouts in my screening. It is a slow-moving and quite taxing film, but I didn't feel that it obviously lacked pace – rather that Ducournau was allowing space for her actors and story to breathe over its 128-minute runtime. And I am usually one of the first to mentally unsheathe my scissors for some chopping down of movies.
It's also likely that many were caught off-guard by Durcournau's change of direction following her Palme D'Or success with Titane at Cannes in 2021. More Trending
And while many critics haven't been kind to Alpha with their reviews out of Cannes, it did receive one of the festival's longer standing ovations this year, clocking in at a none-too-shabby 12 minutes.
But I was engaged throughout – and the mesmerising acting made this a really impactful film that has stayed with me.
Alpha premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. It is yet to receive a UK release date.
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