Julia Ducournau’s Alpha is a film that I’ve found really hard to talk about. At Cannes, everyone talks about what movies they’ve loved, hated, and everywhere in between. In my experience, the narrative around a film became set at Cannes fairly quickly: Sentimental Value was a masterpiece, Sirat was loud, The Phoenician Scheme was minor Wes Anderson. But with Alpha, the narrative was less clear cut.
People were sure that Alpha was a departure from Ducournau, moving away from the body horror that made her famous and brought her a Palme D’Or for Titane in 2021. Alpha, her follow-up, was one of the most talked about films of the festival prior to its premiere. People could not wait to see what Ducournau’s film, believed to be a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic, would be like. But after the premiere and a couple subsequent days of screenings, conversations stopped. The film received no awards from the jury or mention from the press in their favorites of the festival. But it also wasn’t discussed among the biggest controversies. Those more divisive conversations instead focused on Ari Aster’s Eddington, the aforementioned The Phoenician Scheme, and Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound.
Now that the festival has wrapped up and I have some more distance from the films I watched at Cannes, I find myself thinking about Alpha a lot. And it seems like I’m one of the few doing so. I would think there would be more writing about where Ducournau went wrong, or critics sticking up for the film, or even people itching to share their bad-faith takes. Instead, though, the conversation has died. I want to take the time to give Alpha the attention I believe it deserves. Ducournau has created in Alpha a complicated and diseased world that, while certainly disjointed, features valuable and insightful commentary on how communities become ostracized and how loss impacts these communities.
The disease in Alpha begins with patients coughing up a grey powdery dust. Later, their bodies begin to calcify, limiting their mobility and making breathing challenging. When the disease has fully taken over, the sick patient is encased in this hard calcification, appearing like a marble statue. The dead are beautiful in a way. Their corpse glistens, contorted bodies appearing like something in an art gallery. The analogy is somewhat obvious: we gawk at the sick, unable to take our eyes off of the disease working through their body. Ducournau, however, adds another layer. Unlike corpses, which decompose and disintegrate, statues stand the test of time. The dead in Alpha live on, then, as literal memorials of the lives they once contained.
The permanence of death is something Ducournau is clearly interested in with Alpha. Lines between memory, death, and life are thin in Alpha’s world. At first, there are two clear time periods: the saturated world of Alpha’s childhood, where Alpha’s mother (Golshifteh Farahani) works in a hospital tending to the sick, and the washed-out world of Alpha’s adolescence, where dust hangs in the air and Alpha (Mélissa Boros) deals with the difficulties of middle school while also fearing the disease. Yet by the end of the film, the boundary between present and past is hazy. Amin (Tahar Rahim), Alpha’s uncle in recovery from heroin addiction, moves in with Alpha and her mother. As the film goes on, though, we learn that Amin has, or had, the disease at one point in the past. His skin in the present, though pallid and sagging, does not transform to marble, yet in the past, his back is almost entirely encased. The disease is shown to be uncurable, but Amin overcame it. Maybe.
By the end of the film, Amin is a specter, somewhere between real and not real. His impact on Alpha, her mother, and their family is evident: his sickness changes how Maman treats Alpha, wanting to keep her sheltered and safe, and his resilience shows Alpha that the shunning and insults from her schoolmates are not important in the long run. Tahar Rahim’s performance further complicates the character. He is physically jarring to look at. Much has been reported about the amount of weight he lost for the role, and when his shoulder blades protrude from his back, it makes tangible the impact of his addiction and illness. More than just his physical appearance, though, Rahim plays Amin with wild swings, moving from energetic and playfully devious to witheringly weak and fragile.
Amin, despite giving the showiest performance in the film, does not hold its emotional center. That role goes to Maman (for my fellow non-French speakers, Maman means “mama”). She has little life of her own, defined by her relations to Alpha, Amin, and the Berber community they belong to. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, Maman motivates our emotional connection to the material of Alpha. She continually commits to keeping Amin, or the memory of Amin, alive.
Farahani’s performance as Maman is brilliantly calibrated. She is harsh when she needs to be, but we as an audience can always see the pain behind her actions, the fear with which she operates. The strength of Farahani’s performance honestly makes a lot of the conflict between reality and memory harder to decipher. We are so affected by the care with which she treats Alpha and Amin that we believe them to be real no matter whether they live in the past or the present. I can understand that the timeline confusion manipulates and muddles the effectiveness of Alpha, but for me, I was able to elide the differences in time in favor of seeing the beauty and pain in Maman’s catharsis.
I am inclined to be generous with my reading of Alpha. I find myself willing to forgive the ugliness of the cinematography, with its washed-out color palette and unspecific and generic locations. I disregard the often-overbearing soundtrack and occasionally horrible needle drops. What I have been struggling to articulate since I saw the film is why. Why do I treat Alpha differently than I do other films, namely a film like Eddington, whose flaws are no bigger than Alpha’s, but is a much more displeasing film to me? How can I brush off the obvious miscalibrations of Ducournau’s film in favor of a charitable reading?
The easy answer would be to chalk it up to subjectivity. Different films “work” for different people. But that feels like a cop out. What I think it comes down to is the film’s abstractness. Though some parts of Alpha feel agonizingly literal, like some of the dialogue, which sometimes makes scenes sound or cliché, a lot of it interprets the events of the AIDS epidemic in a non-linear, metaphorical way. I happen to really love the symptoms of the disease making its patients into statues. It’s a bit off-putting, sure, but I can appreciate Ducournau’s visuals here.
Similarly, the ambiguity of Amin reminds me of how I’ve grieved the loss of loved ones. When I hike a specific trail in Arizona or see an older man walking a tiny dog, I remember my grandpa, and feel like he’s close to me. When I hear any song from the 1960s or talk about theater, I feel my high school dance teacher’s presence. I’m certainly not the only one to feel like this, and Alpha is certainly not the only film to depict this feeling. But Ducournau’s film, in all its messiness and imperfections, most conveys the rawness and complication that grief brings. It’s an imperfect film, but it should not be written off as minor or worthless.