Latest news with #bodyhorror
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
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cannes Premiere ‘The Plague' Twists the Pock-Marked Perils of Adolescence Into Body Horror — with Joel Edgerton
Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux promised that this year's Un Certain Regard sidebar lineup would be more driven by narrative and genre than years past. Looking at Charlie Polinger's feature directing debut 'The Plague,' he wasn't kidding. This harrowing, 35mm-shot story of pubescent boys tormenting each other at a water polo summer camp doubles as a coming-of-age drama and an adolescent, acne-scarred body-horror nightmare. The 12- and 13-year-olds populating its frames are all afraid of catching an imagined (or not?) contagion — let's call it puberty — that turns their brains into 'mush,' one says, and manifests with psoriasis-like lesions on their bodies. But the words and almost ritualistic humiliations they exchange (think the mocking of speech impediments and centipedes thrown into your bed at night) are even more wounding. More from IndieWire 'Hurry Up Tomorrow' Review: The Weeknd's Emotionally Threadbare Vanity Project Is All Skips, No Repeats 'Re-Animator' Star Barbara Crampton Looks Back on Her Genre Breakout with Nothing but Love (and Some 'Slippery, Gooey' Memories) Polinger, an AFI Conservatory grad working with many of his fellow alumni including cinematographer Steven Breckon, based this disturbing and personal film on his own experiences as a kid at an all-boys summer sports camp, culling from his rediscovered journals to write the script. Millennials who came of age in the aughts ('The Plague' is set in summer 2003) will recognize the touchstones, from the period music references to the Capri-Suns everyone seems to be slurping. 'I was leaning into the Capri-Sun, into sort of this pre-internet or very early internet age, with the kind of jokes that they make,' Polinger told IndieWire. Joel Edgerton, who stars as the boys' generous but out-of-his-depth coach in terms of dealing with unruly and toxic boys, initially received the script from Polinger's agent and wanted to direct it. 'I was like, 'I really have to direct this one. It's too special to me.' He was just really cool about it. We ended up getting on a call. He really related to the themes, the social dynamics of these kids, and bullying, and his own experiences being a 12-year-old boy in Australia. He basically just said, look, I'm happy to produce the film and act in the film, and do anything I can to help get this made.' Polinger and his casting director Rebecca Dealy ('Hereditary') looked at thousands of tapes of kids to cast the right ensemble. They landed on 'Griffin in Summer' star Everett Blunck as Ben, the hero of this story if there is one, and the seemingly innocent kid through whose eyes we see the film. The kind of kid who will see with his awkward, ruthlessly bullied peer who's left alone at the cafeteria. They found Kayo Martin, who plays the camp's freckled top bully Jake who presides over the cool-kids table with imperious authority, off social media. It's a breakout performance for a young star. 'He felt exactly like the type of bully or character who messes with your head in a way that I feel like I haven't seen represented in a movie or TV show very often because he's always very understated,' Polinger said. 'You never know if he's joking or not, and it really kind of gets inside your head. He is so comfortable hanging out with adults all the time and going around New York, going to all the bagel shops and all these places [where Martin does social media pranks], and he does have a certain maturity level that can actually play very uncanny in the situation with other boys.' There are scenes in 'The Plague' that pit the child actors into adult scenarios that are, in real life, likely familiar to them. In one scene, they share sexual fantasies and talk about masturbation from across each other's bunk beds. Directing children always comes with its own set of challenges, even with parents on set, but Polinger and his team worked with an intimacy coordinator to burrow into these most uncomfortable (but relatable) moments. 'The first day with the intimacy coordinator, we all sat around and we were talking about the scene, and she was coming at it very delicately: 'Is this something that you guys know about?' And they were miles ahead of her in terms of what they already knew and the jokes that they were making,' Polinger said. 'It was really important to me that we were capturing that age in a real way. [The actors] were very fearless and just excited to dive into it… They were so much more mature than you would imagine.' In terms of references for the film's more horror-leaning later stretches, Polinger wanted to combine the feel of 1980s and aughts coming-of-age teen movies with a more genre-oriented sensibility (comparisons to 'Black Swan,' eventually, are invited). 'I love those movies about boys, though I often feel like a lot of movies about young boys are either a little more sort of broey hangout or a little more nostalgic, kind of biking-around-the-suburbs type of thing,' he said. Movies like Bo Burnham's 'Eighth Grade' and Julia Ducournau's 'Raw,' he said, 'capture a social dread and vulnerability of your body and something you don't see as much with boys because it requires a certain vulnerability to be an object of terror in that way… I was even looking at some sort of dread-filled, 'Shining' daylight kinds of horror movies, [with] huge imposing spaces.' Movies about military situations, like Stanley Kubrick's 'Full Metal Jacket,' also came to mind. Even Claire Denis' 'Beau Travail,' which is 'such an incredible exploration of masculinity.' Every rising indie filmmaker these days wants to shoot on film — who doesn't? — which can be a big upfront non-negotiable from a first-time director. But 'The Plague' benefits from that celluloid touch, making the movie like a grainy memory of a bad dream. 'It was pretty challenging. We had to find some additional funds to do it. We got a lot of help from Kodak. [It was] definitely hard, and especially with kids and pools and all the other variables that add more time, and having tight days. The film [aspect] just added a whole other wrench into it,' Polinger said, though 'The Plague' did shoot during a sweltering summertime when the kid actors were out of school. Shooting on film, though, he said, 'just made it feel magical. We were capturing something that felt timeless and, to me, there's no comparison. It looks so great to shoot on film, and these kids' faces and closeups just rendered in such a beautiful way.' 'The Plague' will seek a distributor at Cannes, though Polinger already has wind in his sails with another movie lined up, and at A24: an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death' starring Sydney Sweeney. 'The Plague,' which Polinger wants to be seen in theaters, would be a smart fit for any distributor looking for a risky genre offering, and one that offers no easy answers about the prickly (and, yes, pimply) perils of adolescence. 'The Plague' premieres at Cannes on Thursday, May 16. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Best of IndieWire The 19 Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in May, from 'Fair Play' to 'Emily the Criminal' Martin Scorsese's Favorite Movies: 86 Films the Director Wants You to See Christopher Nolan's Favorite Movies: 44 Films the Director Wants You to See
Globe and Mail
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Extreme French thriller Alpha turns Cannes upside down, while Denzel Washington comes out on top
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.
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.
