‘Alpha’ Review
Stars: Mélissa Boros, Golshifteh Farahani, Tahar Rahim, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield, Frédéric Bayer Azem, Louai El Amrousy | Written and Directed by Julia Ducornau
French writer/director Julia Ducornau established herself as a body horror sensation with her first two features, the coming-of-age cannibalism picture Raw and the Palme d’Or-winning Titane, in which a woman had sex with a car. Now she’s back, with another slice of body horror, but sadly, Alpha is something of a disappointment compared to her previous films.
The film is set in France, in the 1980s, where the country is beset by a mysterious epidemic that slowly turns its victims into marble statues. When 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) drunkenly gets a homemade tattoo at a party with a shared needle, her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a medical professional, is horrified and rushes her for tests.
However, the test results will take a while to arrive, and word quickly gets around, resulting in Alpha being bullied and shunned at school as a result of her still-bleeding arm. Meanwhile, as if Alpha’s mother didn’t have enough to deal with, her junkie brother Amin (an emaciated Tahar Rahim) shows up on her doorstep, having contracted the virus, which is slowly killing him.
The main problem with Alpha is that it’s all over the place. At a certain point, through changes in hairstyles and clothing, it becomes apparent that there are timeline shifts, raising the possibility that some scenes may be hallucinations, or that there may be a supernatural element to Amin’s presence in the house.
However, it’s never entirely clear, and the shifts themselves aren’t always obvious, so whatever point Ducornau is trying to make gets lost in the mix, especially as there’s no obvious payoff to the flashback structure.
On a similar note, it’s clear that the marble-flesh epidemic is intended as an allegory for either AIDS (given the 1980s setting) or COVID, but again, by trying to be both things at once, the impact is lost. Quite apart from anything else, the actual horror of the AIDS epidemic is arguably more terrifying (and certainly less pretty) than the marble-flesh virus, and you can’t help feeling that a straight-up AIDS drama might not have been more effective, given that the story otherwise unfolds along relatively conventional lines.
That’s not to say that there aren’t several strong elements in Alpha. For one thing, Mélissa Boros is excellent, and her scenes at school, or with her would-be boyfriend Adrien (Louai El Amrousy), are the best moments in the film, particularly a terrific swimming pool scene, where Alpha starts bleeding and the pool fills with clouds of red blood, causing the screaming children to flee the water.
On top of that, there’s one terrific special effects sequence with the marble-flesh virus, which feels original and inventive in and of itself, but it’s oddly placed in the film and doesn’t seem to have significantly lasting consequences, despite its apparent severity.
In addition, there are some admittedly striking visuals (the final scene in particular), and Ducornau includes a couple of great needle-drops, but Alpha is ultimately too busy for its own good, and it fails to cohere in a satisfying fashion. It also seems to lack the distinctive voice that was there in Raw and Titane, almost as if anybody could have directed it.
In short, this is something of a disappointment, even if it was always going to be difficult to top the highs of Ducornau’s two previous features. Call it “Difficult Third Film Syndrome”.
** 2/5
Alpha is in UK cinemas now.
