I have rarely wanted to love a film more than I wanted to love Alpha. The director, Julia Ducournau, is someone I would count as one of my absolute favourite working filmmakers. Her work prior to this, Raw (2017) and Titane (2021), are both films I think are pretty much perfect, and despite the middling-to-bad reviews Alpha has been getting since its premiere earlier this year, I have been insisting that I’m sure I will like it regardless.
When it was announced as part of the Leeds International Film Festival line-up, it was top of my list to see. Having now seen the film, it pains me to say that Alpha just does not work.
The film follows a trio of characters: 13-year-old Alpha, her mother, a nurse, and Amin, Alpha’s uncle and a recovering addict. The opening scene, playing out to an always-welcome Portishead needle-drop, sees Alpha getting an ‘A’ tattooed on her arm at a party with an implement that is being passed around from person to person. This leaves Alpha suspected of being ill with a mysterious bloodborne disease which acts as the central object of the film’s attention and turns people to marble-like stone. The visuals of this are one of the areas where the film shines; Ducournau is unrivalled in the way she shoots bodies and has an incredible talent for portraying bodily transformations, which is clearly displayed here.
The central disease in the film is overtly a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic: here, the problems begin. The way in which it is stigmatized and ignored by power structures, as well as being shown to be particularly affecting gay men, makes it impossible not to read it as such. The decision to figuratively represent it in the way Alpha does is a strange one. There is so little textual significance attributed to the marble transformations that one can’t help but feel like the primary motivator is that it looks aesthetically striking. As previously stated, Ducournau looks wonderful, but I can’t help but feel that aestheticising such tragic circumstances without much substance to it is not helpful or inherently meaningful.
Ducournau is no stranger to a particularly on-the-nose metaphor. 2017’s Raw uses an insatiable hunger for human flesh as a stand in for puberty, something that is hardly original and could easily be viewed as annoyingly overdone. But the difference is that Raw (as well as Titanne) is an incredibly heightened film in almost every sense. When everything is operating at an over-the-top level and incorporating the farfetched-ness of genre film, you can look past clumsy metaphor construction. Alpha, on the other hand, is so intensely grounded that you can’t help but confront everything at face value. And on the face of it, this image does not hold up against scrutiny.
Beyond this flawed central image, the film is a mixed bag. There is certainly a lot to be admired in it. The performances of the central trio of characters are strong, particularly that of Mélissa Boros, who plays the titular Alpha. It is an astonishing child performance that contains so much emotional power as well as technical control. She also has cited her interest in cinema as coming from Miyazaki films which is an easy way to get me onside. Also doing phenomenal emotional work here is Tahar Rahim as Amin. He is the main way we see the disease manifest and he does so in a way that is hard not to tear up at. There is rarely a sub-par performance to be found in the film, although it does waste Emma Mackey by giving her a character with incredibly little to do.
The lack of substance within these characters is where the film’s issues flare up once again. Despite the built-in emotion of the tragedy that the characters face, none of them have much going on. They are mostly painted with incredibly broad strokes. Alpha, for example, is a character who is ripe for exploration given her age and circumstances but is mostly defined by the events around her. There is very little getting at what is going on internally aside from conflict with her older relatives and peers at school.
The whole film is also structurally very odd. The first half of the film is firmly centred on Alpha and the mystery disease, only for it to take a sudden shift away from that in a way that feels incredibly jarring. There is nothing wrong with shifting narrative focus, and it is certainly confidently done, but it leaves a sense of hollowness in the exploration of themes that need the full weight of the film to focus on.
Alongside the narrative left-turn, the film also introduces multi-layered timelines and goes completely non-linear. There is nothing wrong with this in theory, but the way Ducournau employs it feels slightly bewildering. As I left the cinema, I saw someone else in the audience Googling what happened in the film, and I honestly don’t blame them. The emotional power of what happens in the film’s third act is diluted by how confusing and overstuffed it is by that point.
At the end of the day, this strikes at the heart of the matter when it comes to why Alpha doesn’t work. It has so many ideas, and for every positive there is an equal and opposite negative. Take the film’s use of music for example. The score is frequently overwhelming but in a way which makes sense as an artistic decision: it reflects well the chaos of the characters’ internal lives and makes for an effectively unpleasant viewing experience when needed. But then you’ll get something like the film using ‘Let it Happen’ by Tame Impala over a panicked drug overdose scene which is so jarring and amongst the worst conceptualised needle-drops I’ve seen in a hot minute.
I find it hard to truly dislike Alpha. It is a film rammed with emotion and creative ideas, and the raw skill of Ducournau shines through even when nothing much else is working. It is a confidently-made film that has total faith in itself and I have to respect that. But the messiness of the final product makes for a film that doesn’t hold a candle to the heights I’ve come to expect from her.
