{"id":115542,"date":"2025-05-19T23:11:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-19T23:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/115542\/"},"modified":"2025-05-19T23:11:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-19T23:11:09","slug":"julia-ducournaus-dour-and-dismal-aids-allegory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/115542\/","title":{"rendered":"Julia Ducournau’s Dour and Dismal AIDS Allegory"},"content":{"rendered":"

Julia Ducournau has insisted<\/a> that genre \u201cimposed a distance\u201d on her first two features, but to watch her third \u2014 the dour and dismal \u201cAlpha<\/a>,\u201d which eschews the more legible body horror of her earlier work in favor of a comparatively grounded AIDS allegory \u2014 is to appreciate that genre wasn\u2019t a wedge between emotions in \u201cRaw\u201d and \u201cTitane<\/a>\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Regrettably, \u201cAlpha<\/a>\u201d 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<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"'What<\/a> \"Kate<\/a> <\/p>\n

Ostensibly as keyed into its title character\u2019s emotional growth as the director\u2019s previous films were to their heroines\u2019 physical transformations, \u201cAlpha\u201d 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 (M\u00e9lissa Boros) \u2014\u00a0for reasons that are never compellingly articulated \u2014\u00a0decides to get a massive \u201cA\u201d tattooed on her arm at a Portishead-soundtracked house party where all of the kids are sharing the same dirty needle. The film\u2019s 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\u2019s 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ducournau will hint at the answer in an exasperatingly roundabout manner, but it\u2019s safe to say that Alpha\u2019s motivation is of little interest to her unnamed single mother (Golshifteh Farahani<\/a>), 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\u2019 symptoms are meant to evoke the holiness of recumbent effigies, but most of the victims more closely resemble the guy from \u201cBeastly.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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: \u201cI don\u2019t know if we need a cool aesthetic stand-in for AIDS.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps Ducournau\u2019s case might have been more compelling if \u201cAlpha\u201d had done more \u2014 or anything \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

To that point, \u201cAlpha\u201d is on much firmer ground when illustrating the fear that spreads alongside the virus than it was pushing against it. Alpha\u2019s ostracization at school is,\u00a0like so much in this film,\u00a0diffused 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\u2019s strengths, as the director makes a visceral, bloody spectacle of Alpha\u2019s social pariah status.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The girl\u2019s 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\u2019s unannounced presence terrifies his niece, who doesn\u2019t remember using a marker to connect the dots between the track marks on his arm when she was little.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Alpha begins to suspect that she\u2019s dying of the virus, her paranoia starts to mirror the symptoms of Amin\u2019s drug use, though Ducournau \u2014 in pursuit of a pure feeling that she can\u2019t pin down \u2014 mostly chooses to illustrate this kinship through a series of flashbacks to Alpha\u2019s childhood. Clear enough at first, and then increasingly unstuck in space-time to a degree that undercuts the film\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While bouncier hair and a slightly brighter color scheme help to distinguish between the story\u2019s 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\u2019s had the life sucked out of even its most \u201cjoyous\u201d moments (only an unhelpful montage soundtracked to \u201cThe Mercy Seat\u201d 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\u2019s nightmare might in fact be \u201ca dream within a dream,\u201d but the director\u2019s efforts to snap out of it and rage against the moral conservatism the virus has inspired only serve to emphasize the film\u2019s disconnection from itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Who is Alpha, beyond a self-destructive kid who wants to break free from her mother, and how does the generational trauma she\u2019s inherited from her immigrant grandmother \u2014 a trauma vaguely tinged by the difficulties of assimilation \u2014 allow the virus to serve as a cure for the fear that it breeds? It\u2019s hard to say, and even harder to hear, as Boros and Farahani alike are both lost beneath the film\u2019s booming electronic score whenever they aren\u2019t being smothered by mix-and-match dialogue about love and abandonment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis family doesn\u2019t do boundaries,\u201d Amin says at one point, and \u201cAlpha\u201d is so eager to weaponize that tendency against a world that\u2019s 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\u2019s spine crumbles into a pillar of sand, and in a final sequence that \u2014 at long last \u2014 offers a meaningful illustration of the hurt that these characters have been holding for so long instead of each other.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Somehow overwrought and undercooked all at once, \u201cAlpha\u201d doesn\u2019t have the slightest grip on what it means to be 13 years old in a world that\u2019s 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 \u2014 which is worse than bad because it could have been good \u2014 is that it feels so much, but conveys so little.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Grade: D+<\/p>\n

\u201cAlpha\u201d premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes<\/a> Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters this October.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0to 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 \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Julia Ducournau has insisted that genre \u201cimposed a distance\u201d on her first two features, but to watch her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115543,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[28871,5839,77,3063,6082,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-115542","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-alpha","9":"tag-cannes","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-reviews","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114537030465455764","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}