Ducournau’s dystopia: ‘Alpha’

Cinema | March 30th, 2026

By Greg Carlson

Filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s third feature, a mashup of body horror, family melodrama and AIDS allegory set in a grim and gray dystopia, fails to live up to the promise of her wild debut “Raw” and Palme d’Or winner “Titane.” “Alpha” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and now makes its way through a stateside theatrical release sponsored by Neon. The wobbly screenplay, focused on the triangular dynamics connecting the teenage title character (Mélissa Boros) with her physician mom (Golshifteh Farahani) and addict uncle (Tahar Rahim), unfolds at a leisurely pace. Fortunately, the three central performances help to elevate Ducournau’s repetitious material.

More conventional and far less risky than either of Ducournau’s previous two movies, “Alpha” shows glimmers of promise as a Bildungsroman for our unstable and politically charged times. Boros credibly pulls off the youthful naivete of a contemporary third culture kid, even though the obviousness of the HIV metaphor fixes the future in the past as an oddly anachronistic choice of central conflict. When dealing directly with Alpha’s frustrations at a duplicitous and immature secret boyfriend eager to sexually experiment, Ducournau inches closer to her wheelhouse. Far more scenes, however, burden the protagonist with the unfair responsibilities attending the fallout from Uncle Amin’s junk habit.

The fatherless Alpha discovers in her prodigal relative a friendly, if warped, parental figure. Mom’s commitment to the needs of dying patients comes first, even if Ducournau makes clear just how much Farahani’s unnamed character loves her only child. The frightening bloodborne plague imagined by the director slowly hardens and cracks the skin of sufferers. The frequently (but not always) convincing special effects suggest victims turned into shiny marble statues who cough small clouds of dust from their petrifying lungs. In the film’s most arresting moment, the muscles of a character’s back disintegrate during a medical examination.

While the world burns around them, Alpha and Amin take comfort in their fragile arrangement; for some reason, Ducournau cooks up a reason why the two must share a bedroom in an apartment easily large enough to afford more nocturnal privacy. The narrative flirts with the possibility that Alpha has also become infected with the deadly disease following an ill-advised tattooing with a shared needle during a house party. Niece and uncle often venture out to wander together. In one of the movie’s rare moments of relief from the heavy dread hovering over nearly every exchange, Ducournau drops the needle on “The Mercy Seat.” While a healthier and happier Amin and Alpha gambol on a soccer pitch, the director lets the lyrics of Nick Cave do the heavy lifting.

Unfortunately, Ducournau elects to mess around with the timeline just enough to confuse viewers with a fractured chronology that adds nothing to the tragedy (the five-year-old version of Alpha is played by Ambrine Trigo Ouaked). Alpha’s identification with Amin clearly frightens her mother. Our title character’s impulses toward self-destruction, or just the plain old stupid stuff that adolescents do, should have merited more scenes for Farahani to confront and interact with her character’s daughter in complex ways worthy of Ducournau’s talent.

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