‘Alpha’ Review: Julia Ducournau’s AIDS Allegory Crumbles Under the Weight of its Repetitive Self-Importance [D-] Cannes

Four years ago, a tidal wave hit cinema with Julia Ducournau’s second feature film, Titane. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, Ducournau announced herself as a cinematic voice to be reckoned with as she delivered a film that felt like an adrenaline shot to the head of originality, blending body horror, sexual identity, loneliness, and found-families all within a crazy narrative swing. Expectations couldn’t be higher for her after Titane, and her first film 2016’s Raw, conveyed a director with a singular voice that was destined for continued greatness throughout the long career. But oh how the mighty have fallen, as Ducournau’s latest film is by far the most disappointing, safest film of the year, devoid of the uniqueness and emotional power found in her early work.

We meet our titular protagonists at a party with her friends from high school, experimenting with drugs, drinking, and enjoying the carefree life of an adolescent. In the midst of all the fun and hazy memories, Alpha (Mélissa Boros) allows a fellow party goer to give her a tattoo on her arm. The camera zooms in on her arm as we see the applied pressure of this permanent, life alerting change to her body, via a needle mixing black ink with her skin, piercing it just hard enough for blood to ooze out. This is one of the very few effective moments in the film, as Ducournau slowly lingers the camera on her arm to create a sense of tension and disgust for what is occurring; a stomach turning, careless decision by Alpha. It’s painless in the moment, as she is high out of her mind, but later the night, when her mother Maman (Golshifteh Farahani) is scolding her for going out, holding Alpha’s hair as she is throwing up, she discovers the cursed “A” near her right shoulder, reality of the decision sets in quickly. In an unintentionally hilarious scene involving Emma Mackey as her mother’s co-worker collecting samples for her blood work, Alpha is beyond defiant of wanting the tests taken at all, scared of a little needle to collect her sample without thinking about the larger one that got her into this mess in the first place. Reality slowly starts kicking in, and her whole world is about to change.

The horror on Maman’s face is palpable as she shakes her daughter, demanding answers as to why she could be so careless given that this is a way to extract a “virus” that has been spreading in their region. This “virus” is a new bloodborne disease, which over time, turns whoever has the disease into solid marble statues of their former selves, as we see slowly dying at Maman’s hospital where she works as a nurse. It is beyond clear that Ducournau is intending this virus and what it does to everyone in the film as an allegory for the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and beyond, as the setting and time period of when Alpha takes place. The design of these marble victims is exquisite, perfectly encapsulating the physical and emotional weight the effects of the virus has not just on the infected, but the ones they love. A scene midway through the film where Alpha’s English teacher is taking their partner to the doctor for blood work perfectly captures the seriousness of the virus, as you can hear how heavy this burden is, to carry that daily with no cure in site, coughing up dust and slowly resting their head on their loved ones shoulder; it’s beyond tragic. The metaphor is loudly pronounced as these people turn to marble because deep within all of them lies something radiant that will linger on long after they are gone. Sure they were infected and pass in horrible fashion, slowly becoming lesser, unrecognizable versions of themselves, but what Alpha shows is there is beauty for and long after someone passes. It is a shame though that Ducournau’s film treats this as a minor idea to focus on, because while it is effective from the limit time we see this virus and its effects on screen, it is totally forgotten about for the main story line of Alpha, her family, and some of the bleakest, repetitive use of drug addiction we’ve seen on screen in a long time.

Once confirmed that she is infected with the virus, Alpha tries going to school, but word spreads like wildfire that she is sick, casting her out amongst so many peers within her school. Not that she wasn’t the most popular student in school already, but after multiple times where she starts bleeding (including one over the the top scene where she hits her head from swimming, collides with the wall, blood starts going everywhere, and she doesn’t leave the pool; sidenote: why would she be swimming in the first place if she’s been bleeding at school?), she doesn’t go back to school and spends most of her time at home with her uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim), who has recently surfaced into Alpha’s life following the news of her diagnosis. From this moment on, the film starts to repeat itself at an rather alarming rate, as we see Amin tweaking on the floor of Alpha’s bedroom, trying to overcome the drugs that are in his system and restart their time off of his addiction. A scene or two will go by and he will be finding his way to even more drugs, causing him to need the assistance of Maman to save his life, all in front of Alpha as she sees her mother slowly deteriorate herself as her brother and daughter have caught an illness she can not fix. Small moments of a family dinner or Maman going to work break up the formula of abuse being shown on screen, but there isn’t enough personality and shifting of tone in those scenes for them to have a lasting effect on the overall story. In showcasing this addiction, Ducournau goes for a more blunt approach, beating up the audience over and over again with the grief and pain of these relapses to hammer home the point that this was the root of this family’s pain, Maman’s suffering, and the fate that Alpha will face due to her poor decisions. It’s very simplistic, tedious, and downright lazy from a filmmaker like Ducournau whose last couple of films showcased a director that’s ideas and complexity shined through, making Alpha feel like a step down for her in almost every single way. It’s the type of film that makes you question her previous films and they were as rich as you believe them to be because it doesn’t make sense for her to take on this massive failure of a project for her third film. 

On the technical side of things, the film is a visual mess as well. Ruben Impens cinematography is sloppy and uninspired, converting the past and the present with only two colors, orange and grey. The whole film has this cold look to it that rings hollow and doesn’t allow itself to grab you in the way we are accustomed to in Ducournau’s previous work. The choppy editing from time periods mixed with annoying, unnecessary needle drops (the use of Nick Cave here is criminal) makes for a sensory overload, one that baffles the mind upon retrospect as to how anyone would’ve thought this would’ve been a good idea. Even the performances from Boros, Farahani, and Rahim are mostly forgettable as they are asked to do the same thing over and over again because the story doesn’t really allow them to find additional layers to their characters. Everything is one note; pain, drugs, and suffering, and if you aren’t on board with that, that’s okay, because it’s going to be shown to you again and again till you just want to tap out. This is not even mentioning the third act twist, which you see coming from a mile away, and makes actually no sense in the context of the events of the film. It’s the type of student film level ending that is beneath the talent of someone like Ducournau, who was given full carte blanche to make whatever she wanted following the success behind Titane. One could call it pretentious to defy all odds and advice to make such a one-note mess of a film like this, and I’d tend to agree, but I lean more on the side of naivety and lack of creativity for a vision that just didn’t work at all from her mind to the page to the screen. 

With about thirty minutes left to go in the film, Alpha made me do something I haven’t done in the history of my time as a writer. I closed my notebook, clicked my pen, and sat back to see if the film could surprise me, do something different than what it had already done previously in the last hour-and-a half and note go down the same tired path of a drug addict, misery porn dramas we’ve seen in the past like Requiem for a Dream. To the film’s credit, it stayed consistent, saving the best suffering for last, and leaving this critic with a sour taste in his mouth. Alpha is by far the most disappointing film in years. An unrelentingly bleak movie that is equal parts lazy, repetitive, ugly, and downright boring. It’s been a long time since someone with this much promise in the early part of their career fumbled their own momentum.

Grade: D-

This review is from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival where Alpha premiered In Competition. NEON will release the film theatrically in the U.S.