…And Omega
JUlia Ducournau has the first misfire of her short career with this impenetrable plague drama. MOn dieu.
Alpha
Director: Julia Ducournau • Writer: Julia Ducournau
Starring: Mélissa Boros, Golshifteh Farahani, Tahar Rahim
France • 2hrs 8mins
Opens Hong Kong September 25 • IIA
Grade: C
Alpha could be the most willfully opaque and aggressively insrcrutable film of the year – in every way possible. It’s the type of film where you leave the cinema muttering to yourself, “Did I like that? Did I hate it? Do I even care?” and wondering “Did I understand that? Am I stupid?” while asking “What the fuck is Ducournau smoking?” This from a film top-loaded with talent too: writer-director Julia Ducournau knocked it out of the park with her vet school cannibal debut Raw and her body horror family drama Titane; it stars Golshifteh Farahani (About Elly), who can do very little wrong even when she’s being held hostage in dreck like Extraction and Invasion (fight me), and Tahar Rahim, ditto (A Prophet, The Past… Madame Web). That said, it’s precisely the kind of film that, 15 years from now, some as-yet-un-nicknamed generation will turn into a cult favourite and claim those Gen Z olds just didn’t get it. Whatever Alpha’s fate, right now in this moment it’s simply a mangled metaphor for AIDS (how retro) or COVID (ugh, too soon) or who knows what, that’s as dour and humourless as Ducournau’s first two films were legitimately challenging and creative.
How you’ll feel after you see this
In a grey and, evidently, windy Paris of… sometime, teenaged Alpha (Mélissa Boros) is hanging out a grimy house party, one of those parties where the air is filled with smoke and because it’s a teens’ party all the booze is cheap crap that makes you sick AF the next day. And yes, there’s crap booze in France too. In her blasted daze, Alpha gets a make-shift tattoo with a dirty needle on her upper arm – an intensely creative “A”. When her doctor mother, identified as Maman (Farahani), sees the ink she freaks out, worried that Alpha’s contracted the new, mysterious, blood-borne virus that’s ravaging France? Europe? The world? No clue. That turns its sufferers to stone. Alpha’s also becomes a pariah at school for the lingering bloody mess she leaves everywhere because yeah, the other kids are afraid of the virus too.
In another time other than this one, we meet Maman’s brother Amin (Rahim), a junkie who drops in on his sister every so often – she keeps Narcan handy in case he ODs – who seems to have picked up this virus from needles. Alpha has a formative experience with Amin when Maman leaves her five-year-old in a grungy motel room with a drug addict who nearly dies and leaves this child alone. In the present, Amin drops in for one of his random visits and makes Alpha grow up or some shit, right before he shuffles off his mortal coil and turns to stone, marble to be exact.
It would be easy to drone on and on and on about the symbolism of the marble, and the deep dive into social neuroses born from unknown diseases – many we get just for being with other people – and the scourge of addiction that Ducournau is ostensibly examining but that would just be blathering out the ass because there’s really nothing here. And if there is, Ducournau’s buried it so far down it’s all but invisible. It’s weirdly out of date if it’s an AIDS allegory – there’s some casual homophobia as represented by an English teacher that gets picked on for having a husband. It’s weirdly lacking any sense of urgency or panic if it’s COVID we’re supposed to think of, with the exception of a mini-riot at the hospital Maman works at. It’s almost as if Ducournau is being cryptic for cryptic’s sake, particularly in the dusty ending that marks Alpha’s coming-of-age. I guess. Regular DOP Ruben Impens and production designer Emmanuelle Duplay (Anatomy of a Fall, Emilia Pérez) do a nice job creating a suffocating atmosphere and a commendable job of drifitng back and forth through time visually, and the VFX that transform virus sufferers into marble is creepy and kind of graceful. It’s another big swing, which is always welcome, but Alpha is simply too confounding and unfocused to care about whatever’s on Ducournau’s mind this time.