ALPHA (2025)

Available On Demand from FilmNation Entertainment and NEON!
Directed/Written by Julia Ducournau.
Check out the trailer here!

After 13-year old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) gets a tattoo at a party, her mother Maman (Golshifteh Farahani) who is a nurse, fears that she may have contracted a deadly disease spreading across the French populace that is transferred through dirty needles and sexual contact. When Maman’s junkie brother Amin (Tahar Rahim) shows up on her doorstep, she reluctantly takes him in as she has always done in the past. Amin is suffering from this infectious disease, and the pressure mounts to insane heights for Maman as she deals with the infirmed she takes care of at work and the possibility that her daughter has now contracted the disease. But being the rebellious young girl that she is, Alpha refuses to sit and wait for a diagnosis, causing her to take risks she normally wouldn’t with her safety and that of her loved ones.

Having written and directed two of the most powerful horror films I’ve ever seen with RAW and TITANE, I make it a priority to see a Julia Ducournau film when it comes out. Ducournau is an expert in combining epic storytelling with tactile body horror and high-stakes drama. Watching one of her films, one can never predict where it is going and how things are going to end. While I must admit, sometimes, the themes she plays with feel a bit too heady for me to fully fathom, I always enjoy the sights, sounds, characters, and twists she offers in her films.

With ALPHA, I feel Ducournau is trying something a little less horror and a little more on the drama side. The story is still unpredictable and the imagery, especially during the surreal ending, offers something you just don’t see in mainstream cinema. But the plot feels almost too big for Ducournau to fully grasp. With the film set in the eighties and centered around an infectious disease spreading quickly through the population, it’s obvious Ducournau is making a story about AIDS, but instead of AIDS, people are contracting a disease where their bodies slowly turn to stone. It’s a powerful image seeing all of these people being turned into living statues as their bodies literally dry up and harden, making movement and any kind of chance at normalcy an impossibility. There are some scenes where Maman walks through the ward, checking on the rows of beds of people suffering from this disease that are some of the most powerful segments of the film as this is simply a highly effective way to communicate the impact this disease has on the human body.

At the same time, we are dealing with the subplot where Maman’s brother Amin is dying from the disease, but he also seems to be a junkie suffering from AIDS as well. So Ducournau is playing with a metaphor about AIDS and uses the actual illness of AIDS in her story as well and I think that’s one AIDS too many here. The plot feels cramped with too much going on with the addition of the brother and it clutters the plot up so as to neglect the more interesting plot of the titular character Alpha dealing with the possibility that she herself has come down with the illness. Though this is a lengthy movie, it still feels way too jam packed with tragedy, as if there is one character too many weighing on Maman’s conscience. I know the dedication to her brother is integral to Maman’s character, but I still feel the whole movie would have been a lot more cohesive had the character been focused on less.

The parts where Alpha is attempting to deal with the fact that she might have this disease are some of the best of the movie. Because the tattoo on her arm bleeds occasionally, as some tattoos often do, and because of the worry of contacting this disease weighs so much on the cultural mind, Alpha is ridiculed, bullied, and outcasted from everyone at school. Alpha is tough as nails and as a response to this treatment, she lashes out at her classmates in ways that’ll make you cringe and wince, especially since you know it’s a world with a highly contagious disease around. Again, Ducournau uses the AIDS metaphor amazingly well here. Seeing Maman try to deal with the possibility that her daughter has this disease is scary enough. In many ways it reminds me of how tactile the scares were in Bryan Singer’s first X-MEN movie, making Rogue so dangerous to touch. There’s also a heavy homage to CARRIE with the fear of blood and the crossing from child to adult. It’s that paranoia that Singer and Ducournau plays with that makes for some extremely good body horror.

But aside from some scenes of people crumbling to the touch and turning completely to stone, this is mainly a drama about the complex relationship between Maman and Amin and Maman and Alpha. I feel it was a mistake to split investment into three parts as there is also a friendship between Alpha and Amin that is explored and that makes the whole film feel crowded as all get out. This is a drama with slight horror elements—probably the least amount of horror one will find in the last three movies by Ducournau. Still, the ideas are interesting and held my investment until the end.

The acting is tippy-top drawer. Mélissa Boros delivers a powerful and devastating performance as Alpha, exhibiting emotions and drama that well exceed her years. I heard that Ducournau cast an older woman to play this younger role in order to deal with all of the complex feelings Alpha goes through and Boros plays the part wonderfully, playing that ambiguous age of 13 when you’re not yet a woman, but beginning to shed those child-like ways. Golshifteh Farahani carries a lot of heavy drama as the beleaguered mother of Alpha. You can feel the emotional and physical exhaustion in her performance as her character is trying to heal and protect everyone but failing at every turn. It’s heartbreaking to see how her story plays out. And even though I feel that his role of Amin is the part of the film that should have been clipped or edited heavily, Tahar Rahim is fantastically skeevy, yet surprisingly warm at times. It was interesting to watch this character that could hug you or strike at you like a cobra. All three characters deliver fantastic dramatic performances that will break your heart.

On top of making this drama-heavy between the three leads, Ducournau makes things even more complicated by playing around with the timeline as well. The film often flips between the past and present, with only the age of Alpha and Maman’s haircut distinguishing which era we are in. By the end, time becomes meaningless and things get ultra-surreal, and that’s where this film lost me completely, to be honest. I get that the film shifts from being Alpha’s story to Maman’s and how it may be some kind of comment on the amount of sacrifice Maman has made from her brother, daughter, and all of her patients, but in doing so, it ruins the flow of the story and makes it more complex that it should be.

In the end, ALPHA is a miss for me. It is a powerful drama that left me thinking about it for days afterwards. There are some very solid parts and again, the body horror is thick and potent at times, but Ducournau just didn’t stick the landing here. Still, with Ducournau being such an important voice in horror these days as she is basically the female version of David Cronenberg at this point, ALPHA is an important movie to see despite its flaws and definitely worth mentioning to folks like me who love Ducournau’s RAW and TITANE.