Alpha: Amazing, shock and … moving (critic)
After titanium, Ducournau returns with a horror body on a disease that transforms bodies into marble. Avoiding the cinema traps, it offers a dreamlike descent in the pain of traumas.
Julia Ducournau abandons the frontal provocation of her previous films to explore deeper territories. In the mid -1980s, in a provincial town, a mysterious disease gradually transformed bodies into marble statues. The teenager Alpha (Mélissa Boros, fire of fire) sees his uncle landed in her life his uncle (Tahar Rahim, masterful), while her mother doctor (Golshifteh Farahani) tries to save the sick in the face of general indifference …
From these Cronenbergian premises, the filmmaker draws her film towards an unexpected emotion. Marbled bodies become living statues, filmed with delicacy and even incredible tenderness. A scene shows Amin, cracked skin, while Alpha traces constellations between his blood spots. “It’s prettier like that”. Everything is there, summarizing the gesture of Ducournau which transfigures the horror in beauty. But the filmmaker avoids the cinema traps with message, rather offering a dreamlike descent in the pain of trauma. As proof, this hallucinated night trip between the uncle and the niece, bathed in electric blue light which structures the last act of the film.
More than a concept film, Alpha is first of all a love story, multiple. That of a sister for her brother Junkie, that of a teenager for this uncle whom she discovers, or the more stealthy one of a teacher for her statuvity lover. But it is also a story of ghosts – those who poison us or make us grow, those we held out and who reappear. Film on the fear of losing those we love, on the bodies that betray us, on the traumas that we transmit, Alpha resonates hard.
Of Julia Ducournau with Mélissa Boros, Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani … Duration 2h08. Released August 20, 2025
