Alpha

by Mike McGranaghan

Julia Ducournau takes a step backward in the body-horror genre with her latest effort, Alpha. The film is surprisingly tame coming from the director of the cannibalism chiller Raw and Titane, in which a woman is impregnated after having sex with a car. She plays it safer this time, striving for great emotion but only coming up with a muddled story that’s weirdly free of shocks.

The title character is a 13-year-old girl portrayed by Mélissa Boros. She gets wasted at a party and awakens to discover that someone has given her a homemade tattoo. This freaks out her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani), partially because she’s too young for a tattoo and partially because there’s a lethal virus that can be transmitted by sharing needles. As they both worry about whether Alpha will become infected, Maman’s drug-addicted brother Amin (Tahar Rahim) arrives, turning the household upside down in the process.

The movie’s horror, such as it is, comes from the effect of the disease. People suffering from it find their flesh turning into a marble-like substance. Dust comes out of their mouths when they speak, and they begin to resemble statues. Other contagion thrillers have offered far more alarming sights; we did, after all, just get two 28 Years Later pictures. For a time, we are teased with an interesting possibility. Alpha uses her potentially infected status to terrorize the girls who bully her at school. Unfortunately, that idea is quickly shuttered.

Alpha makes a poor choice in its structure. Two stories are being told simultaneously. One takes place in the present, the other in the past. Maybe I missed the cues or maybe Ducournau doesn’t present them clearly enough, but this did not become apparent right away. Consequently, the plot seems to keep stalling. Worse, the second story, revolving around Maman and Amin, gradually overtakes the one about Alpha. Since the early scenes deal with whether the girl will become sick, shifting focus to a routine plot thread about Maman’s journey as a nurse trying to treat the infected feels like a letdown.

Clearly, the movie is intended to be an allegory for the AIDS epidemic. That’s been done before, and done much better. Ducournau never fully thinks through what point she wants to make, leaving her grasping for relevance. For example, Alpha’s grandmother references “the Red Wind,” a topic that’s largely ignored until becoming very literal in the last scene. Once it arrives, the symbolism is as heavy-handed as it is obvious. The talented Emma Mackey is also wasted in a supporting role as a fellow nurse. Why cast someone of her caliber, only to provide nothing meaningful for her to do?

The best thing about Alpha is the main duo. Boros and Farahani give powerful performances, realistically conveying their characters’ shared fear of what infection would mean. Several individual moments are well done, too. A sequence with Alpha and her classmates in the school swimming pool is suitably tense, even though it’s almost an exact replica of a key scene from the recent The Plague. Any successful elements are, sadly, undone by a lack of storytelling clarity, as well as by a dearth of real jolts. When a disease thriller doesn’t make you tremble with the thought of getting gravely ill, something is very wrong.

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