Strident, oppressive, incoherent and weirdly pointless from first to final … Julia Ducournau’s new film Alpha must be essentially the most bewildering disappointment of this 12 months’s Cannes competitors; even an trustworthy lead efficiency from Mélissa Boros can’t retrieve it.
I admit I used to be agnostic about her much-acclaimed Palme d’Or winner Titane from 2021 however that had an energised function missing in Alpha and Ducournau’s wonderful 2016 debut Raw is nonetheless simply her greatest work.
Body-horror – the keynote of Ducournau’s movies – is nonetheless arguably the style right here, or perhaps body-horror-coming-of age. We are in a form of different current or latest previous; a number of the film seems to happen earlier than France adopted the euro in 2002, or maybe on this imagined world, the euro didn’t occur.
Thirteen-year-old Alpha (Boros), from a Moroccan-French household, royally freaks out her mom (Golshifteh Farahani) one night by getting back from a celebration with the letter A tattooed on her arm. (This by the way signifies a form of badass rebellious angle that she by no means actually shows once more.) With a unclean needle? A shared needle?
Her mom, a physician, is beside herself as a result of her hospital is now overwhelmed with an infection circumstances of a weird new illness, which turns the sufferer right into a marble-white statue. However, regardless of the near-riot creating outdoors the hospital, Ducournau doesn’t present any restrictive hygiene practices and seems to recommend that society finally just about copes with the white-marble illness, with unstressed docs and nurses in the identical hospital smilingly coping with a row of sufferers.
This fictional state of affairs may due to this fact be mentioned to gesture at Aids or Covid, though it is not notably compelling or scary both by itself literal phrases or as metaphor. It may relate to respectable society’s horror of drug addicts – who embrace Alpha’s emaciated smackhead brother Amin (Tahar Ramin) whom Alpha’s mother as soon as very rashly allowed to babysit the five-year-old Alpha in some scuzzy rented room whereas patently out of it – he is evidently supposed to be some form of magically sacrificial determine.
As for Alpha, her tattoo, and her leaking bandage, earn her some bullying ostracism from the category, who’re themselves angrily preoccupied with the illness, and the varied infections of misogyny and homophobia are arguably additionally being satirised.
But the madly, bafflingly overwrought and humourless storytelling can’t overcome the truth that the whole lot right here is frankly unpersuasive and tedious. Every line, each scene, has the emoting dial turned as much as 11 and but feels redundant. Ducournau absolutely has to search out her method again to the cool precision and certainty of Raw.
