An 11-minute standing ovation at Cannes can’t be called a total disaster. Nevertheless, Alpha arrived at the 2025 London Film Festival trailing a, shall we say, less-than-enthusiastic critical response. Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to Palme d’Or winner Titane is a film swollen with ideas, ambitious to the point of convolution, but also a welcome sign of a filmmaker pushing herself beyond the body horror that earned her comparisons to Cronenberg, even if it costs her that early, skin-prick immediacy.
We meet 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) at an age-inappropriate house party in the early 1990s, getting a tattoo — the letter “A” — scrawled on her arm. When her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) notices it, she spirals: was the needle clean? Her fear runs deeper than parental instinct. Alpha’s mother is a doctor, and for years she’s been fighting a bloodborne epidemic that turns people to stone. Things are only made more difficult by the sudden reappearance of her drug-addicted brother Amin (Tahar Rahim), who may also be infected, and of whom Alpha has no memory.
As Alpha waits for her test results, the tattoo becomes her scarlet letter. Rumors reach school. During an English class — while her teacher deals with homophobic students — a drop of Alpha’s blood lands on the overhead projector’s glass, flaring red across the wall. The room erupts. It’s the first of several scenes in which Alpha’s body becomes a site of speculation and disgust, culminating in a nightmarishly choreographed swimming pool sequence. Unseen, her “bad blood” is the source of stigma; made spectacle, it becomes the stuff of terror.
Alpha has been described as an “allegory” for AIDS, though one doubts whether that’s right. The film’s unnamed disease maps too precisely onto the real one. It isn’t an allegory so much as AIDS overlaid with a distancing device: in crowded hospital wards, bodies stiffen and gleam like veined marble. They are, as Alpha tells one patient, beautiful. To render AIDS victims as statues obviously risks bad taste, or at least dulls the political charge of that moment. Yet Ducournau’s interest is less in historical actuality than in acts of remembrance — how grief petrifies the past, or attempts to. These bodies, we learn, are not as monumental as they look. An inversion of Romanticism’s tubercular patient, these bodies are dried out by their disease, coughing plumes of white dust. Like memories, they are brittle as calcium, prone to cracking and crumbling.
Amin’s body tells the same story without the visual poetry; addiction’s damage is written plainly across his skin. Rahim gives the film’s best performance: with a scowled grin he sidesteps the usual clichés of addiction acting, even as the script veers dangerously close to them. The film’s strongest and strangest thread lies in the bond between him and Alpha, for whom the mere possibility of infection marks her as one of the walking dead among her peers. Her mother spies them asleep together, tossing and turning in uncanny synchrony, as if moved by the same invisible hand — her own? Amin sees what she fears most: not that her daughter is dying, but that she might be fine after all.
If Raw was about the horror of inheritance and Titane about reinvention through chosen kinship, Alpha is a portrait of co-dependency between mother and daughter, the two feeding off each other’s fear. But it’s also about a host of other things: epidemic, addiction, bullying, teenage sexuality, folklore (Alpha’s grandmother diagnoses the disease as the work of the “red wind”). At first the story appears split between two timelines, eight years apart, but then they start to contradict one another, then merge. All this plus what appear to be Alpha’s hallucinations, before an ending that asks us to consider whether boundaries between reality and fantasy were ever there in the first place. Inevitably, we lose the plot.
Moment to moment, Ducournau remains a formidable filmmaker, and clearly after something richer than the surface-level provocations of a film like The Substance, which is what some audiences will come seeking. But her command of effect now verges on the tyrannical: everything orchestrated, nothing allowed to breathe. The high-contrast, tinted images — icy blues for the present, saturated ambers for the past — oppressively dictate feeling. Over-insistent needle drops annotate as much as they accompany, to distracting effect. Alpha radiates life, but the film is so densely packed, so insistent on effect, that the feelings become abstract — emotions staged for us rather than felt by us.
DIRECTOR: Julia Ducournau; CAST: Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani, Mélissa Boros, Emma Mackey; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: October 17; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 2 min.
Published as part of London Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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