‘Alpha’ Review: Julia Ducournau’s AIDS Allegory Is Visceral, Overloaded—and Occasionally Moving
In an alternate 1990 ravaged by a mysterious virus that slowly turns people to stone, a defiant 13-year-old fears she may be infected after a reckless tattoo, while her exhausted nurse mother and addict uncle struggle to hold their fragile family together.
The cinema of Julia Ducournau is Cinema with a capital C. Not necessarily in the sense of “great cinema,” but in the way she loads nearly everything she does with more elements and intensity than strictly necessary. As was also the case with Die, My Love—screened in Cannes just a few days earlier—her films start at such a high pitch that there’s nowhere left to climb. They remain stuck at that same maximum volume for two hours. Those capital letters define the director of Titane: a filmmaker bursting with ideas and striking imagery, but one who rarely slows down enough to explore them with sensitivity rather than aggression. And when she does, the films improve considerably.
Put simply, Alpha is an elaborate allegory about AIDS—a body-horror film that imagines the potential destruction of the human body through a virus transmitted sexually or through needles. Most victims fall ill through sex or drugs, or, as may be the case for the teenage protagonist, through a badly done tattoo. The story unfolds in a parallel reality presented as 1990 but that feels more like a B-side version of Earth: windswept exteriors filled with dust, as if global warming had already caused planetary collapse more than thirty years ago.
What happens to the infected is peculiar even by horror standards, something closer to a zombie or superhero movie. Once infected, their bodies gradually harden until they resemble marble—or the Portuguese cobblestones that decorate so many streets in that country and its former colonies. People breathe dust and slowly turn to stone, as if becoming a comatose version of The Thing from Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four.
The protagonist, Alpha (Mélissa Boros), is 13 and one day decides to get a tattoo “the tough way,” with little care or hygiene. Her mother, a nurse played by Golshifteh Farahani, fears she may have been infected and sends her for medical tests—results that will take some time to arrive.
In the meantime, the intense and volatile Alpha goes to school, where her classmates avoid her out of fear of contagion and take every chance they get to isolate or bully her. But the other major conflict at home is the reappearance of Amin, her uncle (a gaunt Tahar Rahim), a severe addict whom his sister still cares for and protects. It’s unclear whether he’s infected or not, but he’s going through a brutal detox process that leaves him looking worse than if he had already turned, like the others, into a massive chunk of shiny pumice stone.
Over the course of two hours, the director of Titane follows the lives of these three characters within a chaotic world where, beyond the spreading disease, nothing seems to function properly. The streets are deserted, doctors are nowhere to be found in the hospital, and everything carries the atmosphere of an impending apocalypse. Alpha—a stubborn 13-year-old if there ever was one—has to deal with the fear that she might be infected, the hostility she faces at school, and the presence of that fragile, nearly doomed uncle who has suddenly moved in with them. And the nurse (whose name we never learn) must cope not with one crisis but two, on top of all the hospitalized patients under her care.
Ducournau isn’t interested in making a medical drama, nor does she fully turn the film into a story about addiction—though that theme certainly runs through it. Instead, she builds a cinematic world somewhere between parallel reality and retro science fiction, where what stands out most are the shocks: the blood, the bodies that literally break apart and disintegrate, and the persistent sense that no one will make it out alive. At times it’s simply too much information, delivered at an overwhelming volume in every possible sense. Fortunately, when the film needs to slow down, Ducournau does find that quieter gear—and the results can be surprisingly moving.
What ultimately saves the film from collapsing into relentless brutality and darkness is the affection, concern, and stubborn loyalty within this small family unit. Between mother and daughter, between the two siblings, and even between the girl and her almost-lost uncle, there exists a complicated, combative but ultimately loving bond. It’s that fragile connection that allows them to keep going in a world that seems to be disintegrating before their eyes. The old line “from dust we came and to dust we shall return” has rarely felt quite so literal.
