Writer and Director: Julia Ducournau
A strange virus has appeared in France, turning the infected into walking statues; their marmoreal skin glistens before it dries out and cracks. Of course, with part of this movie being set in 1990, this is an AIDS film, even though the symptoms of the French virus are different. The hospital wards are mainly full of men lying in their beds, either still as effigies or spluttering chalk dust into the air. Alpha is a brittle and beautiful study of unresolved grief.
Whereas Robin Campillo’s 2017 120 Beats per Minute was a realistic and visceral drama about the AIDS crisis in France, this new French film, directed by Julia Ducournau, is more dreamlike and surreal. Campillo’s devastating film focused on the direct actions of ACT UP against the French Government and pharmaceutical companies, but Alpha’s narrative explores the impact of HIV/AIDS on drug addicts who share needles.
The film begins with these needles. A young girl watches her uncle shoot up as she draws a pattern through the old injection scabs on his arm with a black marker pen. Later, at a party, when she’s a little older, someone tattoos her arm with an A. This young girl, who’s now 13, is Alpha. When her mother discovers the tattoo, still seeping blood, she worries that her daughter is following in her brother’s footsteps.
Alpha is taken to the hospital when she’s given a tetanus shot and where she’s tested for the new virus. Blood seeps out of these injection wounds, too. It seeps out in her English language class at school, and it flows out of her arm into the swimming pool. Her classmates bolt from the pool, leaving Alpha to tread bloody water alone. The school setting is reminiscent of the shocking blood in Carrie.
Back at home, Alpha discovers that she must share her bedroom with her uncle, who’s come back to cold turkey. Alpha’s mother insists that the two share a room, that it would be improper if she shared a room with her brother. “We’re not animals,’ she exclaims as if that explains the dilemma. Uncle and niece shake and tremble in unison during the night.
Other scenes show Alpha’s mother with a different hairstyle at the hospital, which is now too full to take new patients. Nurses and doctors have fled the ward that holds the beautiful marble men in their beds. Their meals stand undelivered and forgotten on a trolley outside the door. Alpha’s mother and one reluctant nurse must cope alone, even as more walking statues wait to be let in at the hospital’s main entrance.
Historian Sarah Schulman, in her book Gentrification of the Mind, about the AIDS crisis in New York, has suggested that survivors of the epidemic suffer from PTSD as they weren’t given the time and space to grieve their lovers and friends who died in the 1980s and 90s. The stigma of the virus prevented them from mourning in traditional ways. And in Alpha, despite the title, it is the mother’s ongoing grief that is explored. Given no other name but “maman”, Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani expertly captures the worry and compassion of a woman looking after her daughter, but who is tied to the terrors of the past.
Tahar Rahim, with his rib bones and vertebrae protruding out of his skin, is the desperate Uncle Amin. His carefree attitude is worn away by the need for drugs; he makes mistakes and decides that he must pay for them. Mélissa Boros puts in an astonishing performance as Alpha, a girl struggling with the terrors of youth: drugs, sex, boyfriends, family. But it is Finnegan Oldfield, as Alpha’s English teacher, reciting Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘A Dream Within A Dream’, who represents the real horror of the AIDS crisis. In his face is the exhaustion and anguish of a whole community.
It would be foolish to dismiss this film as another body horror. Alpha is a thoughtful, innovative way to elegise the losses of the last decades of the twentieth century. The film’s final scene is epic and tragic, demonstrating that the dead still live with us.
Alpha is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 8-19 October.
