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BBC News
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Alpha review: This outlandish horror about an Aids-like epidemic is a 'disorientating, maddening whirlwind'
After winning the Palme d'Or for the shocking Titane, out-there French director Julia Ducournau is back at Cannes with another nightmarishly weird film – but it's an unsatisfying watch. One of the most anticipated titles at this year's Cannes Film Festival was Alpha, written and directed by Julia Ducournau. Her last film, the magnificently bonkers Titane, won the Palme d'Or in 2021, so the news that she was returning to Cannes with another fizzing cocktail of icky body horror and traumatic family relationships had festival-goers excited – if nervous – to see what nightmarish weirdness Ducournau had in store. It turns out that there is nightmarish weirdness aplenty. A disorientating, maddening whirlwind of haunting sights, thunderous music and fiercely intense performances, Alpha confirms that Ducournau is a visionary artist. But once you've recovered from the brain-bashing experience of watching her latest film, it comes to seem a lot less satisfying and stimulating than Titane was. Alpha gets its title from its heroine (Mélissa Boros), a 13-year-old girl who lives in an unnamed French town with her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani). She isn't especially rebellious, but one night she comes home from a party with a large capital letter A carved into her arm by a needle the size of a chopstick. Her mother, a doctor, is understandably upset, especially as the amateurish tattoo might have given Alpha a mysterious virus that turns people to stone. As the months pass, patches of their skin harden, they cough clouds of dust, and eventually they atrophy into cadavers made of polished, cracked, creamy white marble. It's a creepy death, but also a strangely beautiful one: in effect, the deceased are transformed into their own gleaming, cathedral-worthy memorial statues. While the doctor diligently looks after patients with this virus in her spookily understaffed hospital, Alpha's tattoo won't stop gushing blood, an embarrassing affliction that prompts her classmates to shun her. (This is presented as a despicable example of prejudice, but, really, don't the children have a point?) But the doctor doesn't just have her daughter and her patients to worry about. One person who definitely has the virus is her estranged brother Amin (Tahar Rahim), a mischievous and charismatic drug addict. Some scenes near the beginning of Alpha promise that it will be Ducournau's version of a zombie apocalypse thriller. Paranoia rises to hysteria at the hospital, where a security guard struggles to keep the infected outside, and at the school, where students flee as a swimming pool is dyed red with Alpha's blood. Set in a rundown alternate reality, in which the harsh light and muted colours suggest that the end is nigh, the film has sequences reminiscent of everything from 28 Days Later to World War Z, but Ducournau gives them their own uniquely unsettling, poetic atmosphere. The disappointing part is that, ultimately, she does so little with the turning-to-stone disease. Flitting between two time periods (you have to keep a close eye on Farahani's haircut to tell which is which), the film unfolds in the 1980s and the 90s. The virus is associated with gay people and shared needles. And the people who have the virus, or who are suspected of having it, are treated with homophobia and ignorance. In short, the scenario is an analogy for the Aids epidemic, as Ducournau has acknowledged. There is nothing wrong with that, per se. Films often use fictional illnesses to comment on real ones. The issue with Alpha is that the fictional illness doesn't shed any new light on its non-fictional counterpart, nor does it expand upon it to build a more resonant and universal myth. The metaphor isn't a rich one. The virus is Aids by another name, and that's about it. Indeed, for much of the running time, the film drifts away from the magic-realist aspects of the condition altogether, which is a waste of such a fabulously conceived and executed visual effect. The characters seem to forget that they're turning to stone, no one ever discusses the virus's origins or potential cure, and the overcrowding and panic it caused at the hospital just evaporate. What we're left with is an intimate drama about three family members who are rocked by addiction and illness. This raises the niggling question of why Ducournau bothered with the film's science-fiction elements at all. If Alpha is essentially a film about a doctor tending to her addict brother, and the teenage girl caught between them, why disguise it with magic realism? In an early scene, Alpha's teacher reads out Edgar Allen Poe's poem, A Dream Within a Dream, and soon afterwards, Terry Gilliam's fantastical The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is shown on television, so Ducournau gives us fair warning that her own narrative shouldn't be taken literally. But she seems oddly unwilling to commit either to the fantasy or the reality, which is why, for all of the sound and fury of its hallucinatory imagery, it doesn't signify all that much. The muddled story of Amin's addiction is short of insight and plausible detail, and yet the spine-tingling story of the supernatural epidemic is skated over, too. Ducournau has jumped between different genres within her work before, but Alpha might have been more powerful if she had stuck to one. Considering that she has been rightly celebrated for her fearless choices, it feels slightly cowardly that she didn't attempt a film about Aids without any outlandish horror trappings wrapped around it. ★★☆☆☆ -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Daily Mail
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
'Body horror' thriller sees audience member carried out on a stretcher at Cannes
Cannes film festival attendees were stunned as a member of the audience was carried out of a premiere on a stretcher last night. Crowds had turned out to see the debut screening of Alpha, the latest 'body horror' thriller by award-winning Titane director, Julia Ducournau. With Ducournau in the audience, the film was briefly interrupted about an hour into its runtime to attend to an undisclosed medical emergency. Attendees on the balcony were seen waving their phone torches in the darkness as they noticed something was wrong. Some audience members called out for a doctor and asked for the screening to be paused, Variety reports. But as paramedics arrived on scene to remove the ailing guest, the 128-minute feature carried on regardless. The emergency is not thought to be related to the content of the body horror film, which had not shown anything graphic by that point. MailOnline has contacted Cannes Film Festival for comment. Ducournau appeared emotional in the front row as the audience offered a nearly 12-minute standing ovation at the end of the screening. Speaking in French, she thanked all those who supported the project, saying the team 'put a lot into the film'. Ducournau, one of only three women to have ever won the Palme d'Or top prize, is held in high esteem following her last directorial effort, Titane. Alpha follows the tale of a troubled teenager (Mélissa Boros) and her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani) whose 'world collapses after Alpha one day returns from school with a tattoo on her arm', per the Cannes synopsis. An apparent AIDS allegory, a deadly virus passed through shared needle use then results in the skin of the infected turning to marble. Alpha is later cast out by classmates worried about the spread of the infectious new disease. The film features British-French actor Emma Mackey, who burst onto screens in 2019 as wild child Maeve in Sex Education. Alpha was received well by audiences at the film festival on Monday. But not all critics enjoyed the showing. Geoffrey Macnab, writing for The Independent, judged the film a 'confused mess'. rated two stars out of five. 'At the late night press screening I attended, the walkouts seemed prompted more by weariness and ennui than squeamishness or disgust,' he wrote. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave the film one star out of five, judging it 'the tonally inept tale of a girl with a dodgy tattoo and a disease that turns people to marble'. Jordan Mintzer, writing for the Hollywood Reporter, said the film 'felt like three or four movies at once, all told simultaneously and as loudly as possible'. Peter Debruge, for Variety, deemed the film a 'tortured AIDS allegory' and 'rotten follow-up' to Titane.
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Alpha review – Julia Ducournau's disjointed body horror is an absolute gamma
Strident, oppressive, incoherent and weirdly pointless from first to last … Julia Ducournau's new film Alpha has to be the most bewildering disappointment of this year's Cannes competition; even an honest lead performance from Mélissa Boros can't retrieve it. I admit I was agnostic about her much-acclaimed Palme d'Or winner Titane from 2021 but that had an energised purpose lacking in Alpha and Ducournau's excellent 2016 debut Raw is still easily her best work. Body-horror – the keynote of Ducournau's films – is still arguably the genre here, or maybe body-horror-coming-of age. We are in a kind of alternative present or recent past; some of the film appears to take place before France adopted the euro in 2002, or perhaps in this imagined world, the euro didn't happen. Thirteen-year-old Alpha (Boros), from a Moroccan-French family, royally freaks out her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) one evening by coming back from a party with the letter A tattooed on her arm. (This incidentally indicates a kind of badass rebellious attitude that she never really displays again.) With a dirty needle? A shared needle? Her mother, a doctor, is beside herself because her hospital is now overwhelmed with infection cases of a bizarre new disease, which turns the sufferer into a marble-white statue. However, despite the near-riot developing outside the hospital, Ducournau doesn't show any restrictive hygiene practices and appears to suggest that society ultimately pretty much copes with the white-marble disease, with unstressed doctors and nurses in the same hospital smilingly dealing with a row of patients. This fictional situation could therefore be said to gesture at Aids or Covid, although it is not particularly compelling or scary either on its own literal terms or as metaphor. It could relate to respectable society's horror of drug addicts – who include Alpha's emaciated smackhead brother Amin (Tahar Ramin) whom Alpha's mom once very rashly allowed to babysit the five-year-old Alpha in some scuzzy rented room while patently out of it – he is evidently intended to be some sort of magically sacrificial figure. As for Alpha, her tattoo, and her leaking bandage, earn her some bullying ostracism from the class, who are themselves angrily preoccupied with the disease, and the various infections of misogyny and homophobia are arguably also being satirised. But the madly, bafflingly overwrought and humourless storytelling can't overcome the fact that everything here is frankly unpersuasive and tedious. Every line, every scene, has the emoting dial turned up to 11 and yet feels redundant. Ducournau surely has to find her way back to the cool precision and certainty of Raw.
