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Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Alpha' Review: ‘Titane' Director Julia Ducournau Adopts a More Grounded Form of Body Horror for This Dour and Dismal AIDS Allegory
Julia Ducournau has insisted that genre 'imposed a distance' on her first two features, but to watch her third — the dour and dismal 'Alpha,' which eschews the more legible body horror of her earlier work in favor of a comparatively grounded AIDS allegory — is to appreciate that genre wasn't a wedge between emotions in 'Raw' and 'Titane' so much as it was a conduit for them. Depriving herself of that same channel as she plunges headlong into the most loaded material of her career so far, Ducournau struggles to find another mode of expression that might be able to take its place. Regrettably, 'Alpha' is just a few minutes old before that struggle begins to seem futile, as the opening scenes are so helplessly adrift within a cold gray sea of unformed feeling that the rest of the film can only do its best to tread water. The only surprise is that it takes the better part of an hour for one of the characters to almost drown. More from IndieWire 'Sentimental Value' Review: Joachim Trier's Wise and Ecstatically Moving Family Portrait Searches for Intimacy Through Filmmaking Sofia Coppola Says Maude Apatow's Fandom of 'The Virgin Suicides' Proved the Lasting Legacy of the Iconic Film Ostensibly as keyed into its title character's emotional growth as the director's previous films were to their heroines' physical transformations, 'Alpha' starts with the first of its many grave mistakes. The world is overrun with a bloodborne virus that its scientists have yet to understand, and yet 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) — for reasons that are never compellingly articulated — decides to get a massive 'A' tattooed on her arm at a Portishead-soundtracked house party where all of the kids are sharing the same dirty needle. The film's incoherent timeline will later suggest that the virus has already been ravaging France for several years by this point, which only raises more questions about Alpha's choice of body art. Was this an uncharacteristic display of rebellion, or was it the first expression of a self-destructive streak that was seeded within her as a child? Ducournau will hint at the answer in an exasperatingly roundabout manner, but it's safe to say that Alpha's motivation is of little interest to her unnamed single mother (Golshifteh Farahani), who works as a doctor at the local hospital and spends her days watching infected strangers petrify into marble-like statues as their skin hardens and their coughs emit plumes of clay sand. The virus' symptoms are meant to evoke the holiness of recumbent effigies, but most of the victims more closely resemble the guy from 'Beastly.' Will Alpha soon join their ranks? She has to wait two weeks for her test results (pour one out for Emma Mackey, flexing her French in a thankless role as the nurse who facilitates the examination), but that's an eternity for a junior high school kid who was already plenty anxious about boys before she had to deal with the possibility of turning one of them into a perfectly sculpted Alex Pettyfer look-alike. As a fellow critic mused to me after the screening: 'I don't know if we need a cool aesthetic stand-in for AIDS.' Perhaps Ducournau's case might have been more compelling if 'Alpha' had done more — or anything — to anchor the virus in something deeper than its surface-level symbolism, but the movie so consistently obfuscates the epidemic into an atemporal hodgepodge of anguish and acceptance that I soon began to question whether it was even real within the context of this story. To that point, 'Alpha' is on much firmer ground when illustrating the fear that spreads alongside the virus than it was pushing against it. Alpha's ostracization at school is, like so much in this film, diffused across a constellation of unengaging targets in the hopes that one of them might leave an impression (see: Finnegan Oldfield as a gay teacher who sticks around just long enough to recite some Edgar Allen Poe and cry), but a handful of them do. One scene in the school pool does a particularly wicked job of emphasizing Ducournau's strengths, as the director makes a visceral, bloody spectacle of Alpha's social pariah status. The girl's own fear is similarly palpable when her uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim) shows up in her apartment after an eight-year absence. Hunched, jittery, and deep in the depths of heroin withdrawal, Amin's unannounced presence terrifies his niece, who doesn't remember using a marker to connect the dots between the track marks on his arm when she was little. As Alpha begins to suspect that she's dying of the virus, her paranoia starts to mirror the symptoms of Amin's drug use, though Ducournau — in pursuit of a pure feeling that she can't pin down — mostly chooses to illustrate this kinship through a series of flashbacks to Alpha's childhood. Clear enough at first, and then increasingly unstuck in space-time to a degree that undercuts the film's emotional primacy, these glimpses into the past give Rahim a chance to do more than just be a warm presence and writhe around in pain, but conflating his drug use with the effects of the virus dulls any interest in them both. While bouncier hair and a slightly brighter color scheme help to distinguish between the story's then and now, the difference is only so noticeable in a drama this sterile and desaturated; a film that conveys its reactionary self-isolation through the drabness of a Roy Andersson comedy, but feels like it's had the life sucked out of even its most 'joyous' moments (only an unhelpful montage soundtracked to 'The Mercy Seat' by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds manages to qualify for that category). The slipstream of it all is slippery enough to suggest that Ducournau's nightmare might in fact be 'a dream within a dream,' but the director's efforts to snap out of it and rage against the moral conservatism the virus has inspired only serve to emphasize the film's disconnection from itself. Who is Alpha, beyond a self-destructive kid who wants to break free from her mother, and how does the generational trauma she's inherited from her immigrant grandmother — a trauma vaguely tinged by the difficulties of assimilation — allow the virus to serve as a cure for the fear that it breeds? It's hard to say, and even harder to hear, as Boros and Farahani alike are both lost beneath the film's booming electronic score whenever they aren't being smothered by mix-and-match dialogue about love and abandonment. 'This family doesn't do boundaries,' Amin says at one point, and 'Alpha' is so eager to weaponize that tendency against a world that's become afraid of itself that Ducournau effectively blurs all of her ideas into a flavorless sludge. Indeed, the movie only comes alive when it leans into the heightened sort of spectacle that Ducournau regards as an impediment, as it does in the vividly expressive scene where a character's spine crumbles into a pillar of sand, and in a final sequence that — at long last — offers a meaningful illustration of the hurt that these characters have been holding for so long instead of each other. Somehow overwrought and undercooked all at once, 'Alpha' doesn't have the slightest grip on what it means to be 13 years old in a world that's storming with tragedy on all sides, but Ducournau implicitly understands that no one is ever old enough to bear the burdens unto which they are born. The maddening frustration of her first unambiguous misfire — which is worse than bad because it could have been good — is that it feels so much, but conveys so little. 'Alpha' premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters this October. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
France 24
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
'Palme d'Or whisperer': US distributor Neon picks Cannes winner again
Neon, a New York-based movie outfit, has been dubbed "the Palme d'Or whisperer" for its extraordinary track record. After "Parasite", "Titane", "Triangle of Sadness", "Anatomy of a Fall" and last year's winner "Anora", it struck gold again on Saturday by buying the US rights for Jafar Panahi's "It Was Just an Accident". Neon locked up the Iranian director's latest feature before Saturday night's awards ceremony in a deal on the French Riviera. "The Dream Team," the company wrote on X, listing its six previous hits. Neon purchases -- and more recently, has produced -- movies that it then distributes to theatres, as well as running marketing and awards campaigns for the films. It also picked up the North American rights to "Sentimental Value" by Norway's Joachim Trier, which won the second prize Grand Prix on Saturday. The winner of a special jury prize, rave-themed road trip movie "Sirat", will also be released by Neon. The company was founded by Tom Quinn who spent decades working in indie films with producers including Harvey Weinstein before deciding to branch out on his own.
USA Today
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
NEON flexed its sixth straight Cannes Palme d'Or win with a Michael Jordan rings pic
NEON flexed its sixth straight Cannes Palme d'Or win with a Michael Jordan rings pic Film distributor NEON is on an absolutely incredible run at the Cannes Film Festival, picking up its sixth straight Palme d'Or victory on Saturday for filmmaker Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident. NEON picked up the film's distribution rights earlier in the week, which keeps the studio's Palme d'Or streak alive after the 2025 Cannes jury picked Panahi's film for the top prize. Another NEON film, Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value, walked away with the Grand Prix this year, Cannes' second highest honor for a title in competition. After Panahi's film won the 2025 Palme d'Or on Saturday, NEON bragged about its sixth straight victory by posting a photo of Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan with his six NBA championship rings. What a mic drop. The distributor posted a similar Cannes NBA flex last year with Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant commemorating his five championships. Now, it gets to six with Air Jordan. NEON's five consecutive Palme d'Or winners before It Was Just an Accident were 2019's Parasite, 2021's Titane, 2022's Triangle of Sadness, 2023's Anatomy of a Fall and 2024's Anora. All of those films outside of Titane were nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and two (Parasite, Anora) won it outright. We'll see if NEON can keep its stunning Cannes Palme d'Or streak next year... and if it keeps these awesome NBA posts going, too.
Metro
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
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. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: The real story behind those '20-minute standing ovations' at Cannes Film Festival MORE: Paul Mescal rejects 'lazy and frustrating' Brokeback Mountain comparisons to new gay film MORE: The 'must-watch' film of 2025 just received a 19-minute standing ovation at Cannes
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Japanese Producers Call for Safety Investigation After Cannes Falling Palm Tree Accident
The Japanese production companies behind 'Brand New Landscape' are urging a 'swift investigation' after one of their producers was injured by a falling palm tree at the Cannes Film Festival. Produced by Siglo Co., Ltd. and LesPros Entertainment Co., Ltd., 'Brand New Landscape' is a selection at Cannes Directors' Fortnight this year. More from Variety Julia Ducournau's 'Titane' Follow-Up 'Alpha' Gets Thunderous 11.5-Minute Cannes Ovation After Premiere Sees Attendee Carried Out on Stretcher 'Alpha' Review: A Potentially Infected Tattoo Sparks a Tortured AIDS Allegory in Julia Ducournau's Rotten Follow-up to 'Titane' 'My Father's Shadow' Review: Nigeria's First Ever Cannes Selection Marks a Miraculous Gem of Autofiction 'The incident occurred around midday on Saturday, May 17, 2025 (local time), while the team was enroute to an official Directors' Fortnight event. While walking along the beachside promenade on Boulevard de la Croisette, a palm tree several meters tall suddenly fell. A LesPros Entertainment production producer escorting the cast was struck by the tree and sustained injuries in the unforeseen accident,' reads a statement shared with Variety by the production companies. 'The injured producer was immediately transported to a local hospital by emergency services. Medical examination confirmed fractures to the nose and parts of the body. Fortunately, the producer remained conscious and is currently in stable condition. Medical treatment and recovery will continue under professional supervision,' the statement adds. As of their statement, the companies confirmed they have 'not received an official report regarding the incident from the festival organizers or local authorities.' 'Given that the Cannes Film Festival remains ongoing, and the incident took place in a highly frequented area, we sincerely hope for a swift investigation into the cause and the implementation of preventative measures to ensure such accidents do not happen again in the future,' the statement says. Variety has reached out to the festival for comment. 'Brand New Landscape' is directed by rising filmmaker Yuiga Danzuka. The film follows two siblings grappling with their mother's absence and the return of their estranged father, a renowned architect, against the backdrop of Tokyo's ever-changing of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
