It would be generous to characterise the response, at this year’s Cannes film festival, to Julia Ducournau’s latest allegorical horror as “divisive” or “mixed”. In truth, the general feeling was that her follow-up to Titane, which won the Palme d’Or in 2021, was something of a critical bomb. Yet it requires only the briefest poke about the internet to confirm the reviews of Alpha were not significantly worse than those for its predecessor.
The French woman is that sort of film-maker. Following the premiere, this critic turned to his neighbour and said, “Well, that was awesome!” (or something more appropriate for highbrow discourse) only to sense heads all around swivelling in appalled disdain.
Anyway, Alpha has continued to burrow the right sort of unease into my brain. If Ducournau does have a flaw it is her tendency to overload her films with baroque complications. It requires some hacking through the foliage to get to the key themes. The on-the-nose metaphor for Aids is, however, unmistakable.
Alpha, played by the open-faced, charismatic Mélissa Boros, is a 13-year-old of north African origin, living in an unnamed French town with her equally unnamed mother (the electric Golshifteh Farahani). Panic sets in when the girl returns from a party with the letter “A” tattooed on her arm. A deadly infectious disease is about the place, and Alpha’s mum – as evidenced by the fate of her brother, Amin (Tahar Rahim) – knows it can be passed on by dirty needles.
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No sooner has this information sunk in than Amin, apparently still addicted to heroin, turns up to seek shelter in the family’s apartment. Alpha and Amin form an uneasy partnership as, both shunned by polite society, they bustle about town to tunes by the likes of Nick Cave and Portishead.
Such material could easily generate a rough-edged piece of social realism, but Ducournau, as is her habit, makes it immediately clear that we are in a darkly fantastic world. Those infected with the disease, which has something of the Old Testament about it, begin by wheezing white dust before ending up literally calcified into grey statues of themselves.
“When I realised I had to create the disease, my first reaction was that I wanted to make the patients beautiful,” Ducournau said at Cannes. There is, indeed, a sense of the patients becoming aestheticised tributes to the people they had once been. It is a notion both unsettling and moving.
Ducournau remains a virtuoso of cinematic effect. As in Titane, she creates a murky, off-centre version of the real world that works her characters’ angst into the oily light that plays about their scurrying feet. Ruben Impens, the great Belgian cinematographer, is in complete sympathy with the film’s gestures towards a fairy-story otherness. This may be the 1990s. But it could be any time.
None of this would make any sense without appropriate performances. All three leads are, happily, cranking at full pelt. There is a desperation to Farahani’s performance that builds with the growing sense of apocalypse. Boros find totemic significance in her holy child. Rahim manages to exceed even the mighty expectations he has built in films such as A Prophet and The Mauritanian. Slimmed down to a skeletal shadow, he wears a whole world of suffering on what is left of his shoulders.
Mind you, everyone here is suffering. That overbearing mass of existential angst almost certainly contributes to the many negative responses, but few will endure its attack without admitting they’ve sat through something out of the ordinary.
In cinemas from Friday, November 14th
