Alpha
Julia Ducournau’s third film is just as bizarre, confrontational and cinematically mesmerising as her first two ventures into the dark side.
Till death: Tahar Rahim and Mélissa Boros
Image courtesy of Curzon.
The French director Julia Ducournau is hellbent on dislodging us from our comfort zone. Tapping into the tropes of the horror film (body horror, in particular|), she lifts the genre into a whole new level while doffing her cap to her forebears Kubrick and Cronenberg. Her latest film opens spectacularly and pretty much maintains its powerful sense of the surreal until the very end, while Ducournau manages to put on the screen images we have never witnessed before in the cinema. She has us from the very start.
An orange screen is filled with smoke and flecked with sparks, gradually dissipating to reveal what looks like a Martian crust which, in turn, cracks and melts to reveal the extreme close-up of a dermal sore. And, as the camera continues to pan out, we see that the sore is the track mark on a man’s forearm. And still Ducournau’s camera pulls away, revealing more track marks, which are then lovingly connected by the black ink from a magic marker, guided by the hand of a very young girl. As it happens, the forearm belongs to a virtually comatose Amin (a practically unrecognisable Tahar Rahim), who looks on woozily as the girl proceeds with her naïve art, connecting one mark to the next. “It’s prettier this way,” she reassures him. It is a moment of intimacy between man and girl that is almost unbearable, as the innocent attempts to camouflage the ills of the heroin addict.
The girl is Alpha and the next scene cuts abruptly to the present to reveal the close-up of a needle being heated, dipped in black ink and then pushed beneath the epidermis of the arm of a 13-year-old Alpha, herself now almost comatose. These early scenes of punctured skin and needles, of young people injecting unknown substances into their bloodstreams, are not for the faint-hearted. But, apparently, many young people do routinely have ink and heroin injected into their bodies, at the risk of contamination, disease and death.
Being Julia Ducournau, this theme is expanded on as the director ruminates on syringes, sickness, drug addiction, tattoos, cultural identity, homophobia, family ties and death. Her world feels marginally futuristic, as the weather continues to deteriorate and a new pandemic is filling the wards of hospitals, where Alpha’s mother, a doctor beautifully realised by Golshifteh Farahani, tends to the dying. This new pandemic turns its victims into walking zombies, their skin taking on a greyish-yellowish pallor as it cracks and breaks away in shards. Like Aids, it is transmissible by blood and infected needles and Alpha immediately poses a threat to her classmates, who turn against her en masse…
Julia Ducournau is dealing with big themes here and brings a hyped-up reality to many scenes of virtuosic cinema. She is one of the true originals on the world stage of international cinema, bringing fresh ideas to tired material and using the full paint box at her disposal. From the brilliant soundtrack to the artful camerawork and editing, the film sucks one into its singular nightmare, augmented by terrific performances from the three leads. Tahar Rahim lost 44 pounds for his part and introduces a range of emotional arcs to a man on the brink of death and ecstasy, while the Franco-Iranian Golshifteh Farahani has never been better as the doctor juggling the demands of motherhood with her duties at the hospital. And the Franco-Moroccan Mélissa Boros is a revelation as the schoolgirl swept up by her hormones and the new world order. This is cinema at its most original and daring, a whirlwind of ideas and striking images, all infused with the entrenched carnality and eroticism that the Palme d’Or-winning director previously brought us with her Raw (2016) and Titane (2021).
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani, Mélissa Boros, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield, Louai El Amrousy, Marc Riso.
Dir Julia Ducournau, Pro Jean des Forêts, Amelie Jacqu, Éric Altmayer and Nicolas Altmayer, Screenplay Julia Ducournau, Ph Ruben Impens, Pro Des Emmanuelle Duplay, Ed Jean-Christophe Bouzy, Music Jim Williams, Costumes Isabelle Pannetier.
Petit Film/Mandarin & Compagnie/France 3 Cinéma/Frakas Productions-Curzon.
127 mins. France/Belgium. 2025. French Rel: 5 August 2025. UK Rel: 14 November 2025. Cert. 15.
