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.
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