Love and negligence collide in Alpha, a sombre, visually stunning family horror.
Expectation is a brutal critic. For a filmmaker like Julia Ducournau, who arrived fully formed with the incendiary Raw in 2016, the weight of anticipation becomes almost impossible to manage. That debut, a cannibalistic coming-of-age story, announced a director unafraid of the human body’s most grotesque possibilities. Five years later, she followed it with Titane, a film so feral, so wildly unclassifiable that it made Raw look like a gentle drama. That film won the Palme d’Or, cementing Ducournau’s reputation as one of the most daring voices in modern cinema. When a director operates at that level of originality, the question is never simply whether a new film is good. The question is whether it can surprise you again.
With Alpha, Ducournau attempts to answer that question. Her latest shifts the visceral horror of her earlier work into something more somber, though no less physically explicit. Set in an alternate reality France, the film explores family trauma and addiction against the backdrop of a blood-borne epidemic. It is a story of negligence and desperate love, told through a fractured timeline that follows a young woman, Alpha, from childhood to her reckless teenage years.
While the director’s signature visual audacity remains—transforming a disease into something harrowingly beautiful—Alpha operates with a different kind of tension. It lacks the wild, unpredictable energy that made her previous films so exhilarating. Instead, it settles into a haunting but uneven rhythm. This review explores why Ducournau’s latest, despite its stunning cast and striking imagery, struggles to escape the long shadow of the films that came before it.
Alpha, a troubled 13-year-old lives with her single mum. Their world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm.
Director Julia Ducournau
Screenplay Julia Ducournau
Genres Body horror, Thriller, Drama, Narrative, Coming-of-age story
Alpha: Review: Julia Ducournau’s Latest Lacks Raw Ferocity
A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden
There are drawbacks to being one of the most daring and original voices in cinema. Chief among them is expectation. Audiences anticipate that each new effort will somehow outshine the previous.
After 2016’s Raw, Julia Ducournau’s incandescent first feature, surely no one expected Titane. And I mean no one. Feral and unforgiving, homaging others but blazing its own wildly individual path, Ducournau’s sophomore effort took home Cannes’s Palm d’Or in 2021. The film that defies summarization managed to make Raw look tame, almost precious. Raw, by the way, is about a college freshmen overcome with cannibalistic frenzy whenever she’s aroused, if you haven’t seen it. Tame and precious.
So, expectations for Alpha, the filmmaker’s latest, were high.
The tale begins with its best scene. Amin (a wondrous Tahar Rahim) sits with his arm outstretched as his 5-year-old niece Alpha (Ambrine Trigo Oaked) makes his needle wounds pretty by connecting them, constellation-like, with a black marker. Simultaneously heartwarming and queasying, it seems the perfect opening to a Ducournau project.
We flash forward quickly to another disturbing scene. This time, 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) has her arm outstretched. She’s barely lucid, surrounded by teens partying obliviously, as someone tattoos an enormous A on her arm. The work is not professional and draws plenty of blood.
From here, Alpha oscillates between two timelines in an alternate reality France. The core story of love and negligence, family trauma and addiction, sits in the context of a blood-borne epidemic. An epidemic to which Alpha has now made herself susceptible.
The AIDS analogy is clear but expect Ducournau’s visual style to turn the somber into something harrowingly beautiful. Sufferers of this unnamed virus show symptoms of smoke escaping their mouths when they cough. As the diseases progresses, bodies turn to something akin to blue veined, cracking marble.
It’s in this world that confused, self-destructive Alpha comes of age. Her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor, becomes passionately, almost blindly obsessed with keeping her junky brother and her reckless daughter safe.
The crisscrossing timelines often rob the film of its momentum. The real problem, though, is that in the end, Ducournau employs a fantasy trope to connect the timelines and embody the mother’s anxiety. Vague as she is about it, and powerful as the final moments are, Ducournau cannot breathe enough life into the cliché to elevate it above cliché.
There is a haunting ghost story at work here. Ducournau’s cast is astounding, and her visual style, though far more somber here than in her previous work, is still enough to draw a gasp. But Alpha boasts less imagination than either of the filmmaker’s previous efforts, and it’s hard not to be a tad disappointed.
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Jim "The Don" Mcleod has been reading horror for over 35 years, and reviewing horror for over 16 years. When he is not spending his time promoting the horror genre, he is either annoying his family or mucking about with his two dogs Casper and Molly.
