Cinematic trailblazer and Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau’s latest film offers a quiet revolution in genre filmmaking, employing techniques borrowed from horror and body horror that lead us through a family’s story of fear and pain, ultimately chronicling their journey towards love, compassion, and acceptance.
The Garden Cinema View:
Arriving on a tide of mixed festival responses, Alpha is shaping to be Julia Ducournau’s most divisive film. It is something of an unwieldy creation, dealing with heavy metaphors of loss, raw epidemic metaphors (for AIDS and beyond), and the real horror of being a teenager in the 1990s. This is wrapped in a slippery period setting, and draws upon inspiration from wide-ranging sources encompassing American Romantic novelists, the petrification disease from Sogo Ishii’s August in the Water, and Tupac. A quite remarkable cast that includes Golshifteh Farahani, a Denis Lavant-channelling Tahar Rahim, and Emma Mackey keeps things moving, even as the story has a tendency to drift into frustrating dead ends.
Alpha might not offer the taut narrative pleasure of Raw, or the chaotic fairytale logic of Titane, but it still brims with the big ideas and gnarly imagery we have come to expect from this iconoclastic filmmaker.
