Alpha

Julia Ducournau’s unsettling and visceral style is on full display in this Palme D’or nominated new film. Here, a 13-year-old girl is suspected of carrying a deadly disease after returning home from school with a gruesome tattoo on her arm. From the director of RAW and TITANE.

Review from Little White Lies

I’m not afraid to die.” The refrain of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ ‘The Mercy Seat’ seems hardcoded into the DNA of Julia Ducournau’s third feature, which sees the Palme d’Or winner move away from the shock and awe body horror of Raw and Titane into something somehow sadder and stranger. That’s how 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) fancies herself, reckless and angsty in her adolescent way, kicking against her mother’s (Goldshifteh Farahami) parenting with drinking and smoking and having an affair with her classmate Adrien even though he already has a girlfriend. But if Alpha is the screaming guitars and defiant snarl of Cave’s first iteration of this song, her Uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim) is the soul-wrenching resignation of the version recorded a quarter of a century later. He turns up mid heroin detox, sprawled on Alpha’s bedroom floor, rail thin, shivering and sweating through his clothes with trackmarks on his arms. Alpha doesn’t recognise him; she threatens him with a knife. Amin just laughs.

The stab of a different needle sets Alpha into motion: when the teenager returns from a house party with a crude stick-n-poke tattoo of the letter A on her arm (not quite a scarlet letter but not far off), her mother is understandably angry, but more than that, she’s frightened. A fatal blood-borne illness has swept through society, causing the sick to slowly, painfully turn to stone, and as one of the few doctors willing to treat the sick, she’s witnessed it first hand. Alpha’s cluelessness sends her mother into a tailspin. Amin has already contracted the disease through his drug use and she can’t bear to lose another loved one.

The unnamed virus is an obvious stand-in for AIDS, perceived with the same hushed disgust by outsiders. In Alpha’s English class her teacher (Finnegan Oldfield) is subject to homophobic slurs from his students; when Alpha later sees him in the hospital waiting room, accompanying his sick partner, she’s the only person who doesn’t recoil. But the painful transformation of the sick into stone relics is a curious twist. They become monuments to the very thing that killed them, not just the sickness but the treatment of the sick – their ostracisation and abandonment. Here Ducournau positions the dead as martyrs, as worthy of a monument as any king or general, a testament to the burden of shame placed upon them by society which placed the blame for AIDS at the feet of the LGBTQ+ community. The burden of shame that reverberated for generations and still isn’t taught in schools, as we slide backwards towards conservatism in our present and run the risk of learning nothing from the past.

Read the rest of the review from Hannah Strong here...