Alpha
Alpha, the third film from Julia Ducournau, contains some of the transgressive body-horror we've come to expect from this talented French filmmaker, but little of the playful volatility that made films like Raw and Titane so successful
Julia Ducournau seems to have fallen victim to her own success. Her first two features (2016’s Raw and 2021's Palme d’Or winner Titane) announced a filmmaker of singular vision, marrying gnarly body horror with exuberantly deviant negotiations of burgeoning queer identity. When her notably more downbeat third feature opened at Cannes earlier this year, where attendees tend to be as eager to depose queens as they are to crown them, this enfant terrible inevitably found herself unable to maintain her winning streak.
Despite its vitriolic reception, Alpha is in many ways consistent with Ducournau’s small oeuvre. A dystopian tale of a teenager growing up amid the paranoia and moral panic surrounding a bloodborne disease that transforms its victims into marble, the film provides plenty of the visceral bodily transformations (realised through ingenious practical effects) and boundary-transgressing intergenerational interplay that Ducournau’s admirers have come to expect.
What lets Alpha down is the dour register that Ducournau adopts in lieu of her usual playful volatility. Despite best efforts from a committed cast – including newcomer Mélissa Boros as titular teen Alpha alongside established stars Golshifteh Farahani and Tahar Rahim – Ducournau imbues her sci-fi analogy for the AIDS epidemic with a stale air of misery that provides little insight into the history it attempts to render in metaphor.
It’s a letdown, but three films do not an auteur make. If Ducournau hopes to win back the crowd, she’ll have to inject a little more life into her next cinema du corps.
Released 14 Nov by Curzon; certificate 15