Alpha Is a Striking Mess of a Movie

That Coco Chanel quote about how you should look in the mirror before leaving the house and take one thing off is probably apocryphal, but it’s nevertheless one I’ve started to wish director Julia Ducournau would apply to her work. Does the character with a plate in her skull and an erotic obsession with automobiles also have to be a serial killer? Does a 13-year-old girl’s AIDS scare that triggers memories of her heroin-addicted uncle also have to involve sufferers turning to stone? Ducournau stormed on the scene with her 2016 debut, Raw, a fantastically feral coming-of-age film that was all the better for the ways that its disparate elements — cannibalism, a sexual awakening, a sisterly rivalry, and veterinary-school hazing — didn’t click together perfectly. But Titane, which won her the Palme d’Or in 2021 and was bigger and bolder, overflowing with striking imagery and ideas about gender, bodies, and brutality, never clicked together at all. I don’t want to describe my struggles with Ducournau as being about excess, because that could be misconstrued as a squeamish critique of the body horror she deploys so vividly. It’s more that her two most recent films feel beset by a literal too-muchness, to the point where you can barely perceive their thematic core due to everything piled on top of it.

That core, in Alpha, has to do with the anguish of trying to save someone from themselves. Amin, played by Tahar Rahim, is the uncle whom 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros, who has an old-soul face) barely remembers, because the last time he was in her life, she was just a child connecting the abscesses on his arm with a marker, as if finding constellations among the signs of his addiction. Alpha lives alone with her unnamed mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor who works at a nearby hospital as well as out of an office in their apartment and who is increasingly exasperated by her daughter’s budding teenager misbehavior. When Alpha gets a stick-and-poke tattoo of an A on her arm at a party, her mother panics over the girl’s inability to offer any details about the needle used and drags her in to get tested for a frightening new virus. It’s the ’90s, and this virus has been causing death, sickness, and bursts of panic in a population that doesn’t seem very educated on how it’s spread. Those who have it cough up dust and gradually transform into what looks like marble, their skin hardening and cracking along their veins, their steps getting heavy. It can barely be considered a metaphor for AIDS when it’s AIDS in every aspect but the fantastical syndromes — spread via sexual contact and needles, it appears to eventually kill everyone infected with it and before then turns those who have it into pariahs.

Alpha’s brush with possible exposure — and her mother’s alarm — seems to summon Amin like a Bat-Signal, and he turns up in the apartment one day. Lean, haggard, and sporting a crooked smile, Amin is still obviously in the throes of heroin addiction, and Alpha’s afraid of him, despite her mother’s stern insistence that he has a right to be there, set up on a spare mattress. But in his teasing and his jackal-sly energy (Rahim’s performance is a fascinating mix of charismatic and off-putting), Amin also provides company that Alpha rarely has, especially once she becomes a pariah at school because everyone is afraid she’ll infect them. Flashbacks, signaled by warmer colors than the film’s starker present, start to provide context to the relationship between Amin and Alpha’s mother as well as to how they fit into their close-knit family, who gather for bickering and mutton on Eid, chatting in Berber, which Alpha can’t understand. But the film fails to fit its various ideas into something greater, not because what it’s trying to depict is too complicated but because Ducournau is again juggling too much.

She is, in particular, dealing with themes of infection and addiction while never really doing justice to either. The virus that Alpha puts onscreen is poetic and eerie, hardening features and leaving the dead looking like statues grimacing in pain. But it’s also a way for the film to shake its head at how the infected are shunned without depicting how its real-world equivalent was weaponized against the already marginalized groups being decimated by it. On one side of the movie is Alpha getting bullied by her classmates for possibly being contagious, and on the other is Amin flirting with death by heroin because death by the virus is worse. It’s not a balanced equation, but it’d be closer to one if the film unfolded from the contradictory and genuinely anguished perspective of Alpha’s mother, who’s battling to protect her child while keeping her brother alive, rather than Alpha herself, who spends the movie trying to decode the mystery that is her uncle. Alpha is more evidence of Ducournau’s genius for evocative imagery and striking compositions, but it also suggests she’d benefit from boundaries to push against.