Curator Watchlist
Alpha is a daring, emotionally punishing drama that trades the overt body-horror shocks of Julia Ducournau’s earlier work for a more mournful, allegorical story about illness, grief, addiction, and the terror of growing up. It has striking imagery and real emotional force, but its heavy symbolism and deliberately… Read more
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 2h 8m
Director: Julia Ducournau
Starring: Mélissa Boros, Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani
Alpha, a troubled 13-year-old lives with her single mom. Their world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm.
Julia Ducournau
Mélissa Boros, Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani
Alpha is a daring, emotionally punishing drama that trades the overt body-horror shocks of Julia Ducournau’s earlier work for a more mournful, allegorical story about illness, grief, addiction, and the terror of growing up. It has striking imagery and real emotional force, but its heavy symbolism and deliberately abrasive structure will divide viewers.
Alpha is less interested in scares than in dread: the dread of illness, of memory, of a family fraying under pressure, of a child absorbing adult catastrophe before she can name it. The film’s most striking achievement is how it turns private trauma into something almost geological, with dust, skin, and space itself seeming to carry grief.
Julia Ducournau pushes hard here, and not every push lands. The film is dense, sometimes stubbornly opaque, and its allegorical design can feel overdetermined. But even when it frustrates, it rarely feels inert; the performances, especially from its young lead, give the film a trembling human center.
If Raw and Titane used genre as a pressure valve, Alpha uses restraint as its own kind of provocation. The result is colder and more mournful than many viewers will expect, but also more openly tragic. For the right audience, that severity is the point.
Sydney🚀 (3.5★) · 1559 likes
What happens to you happens to me. Ducournau trusts so much on such a risky dramatic fulcrum here that the insane rating curve isn’t super surprising, but lol. Definitely her boldest project yet in terms of what she’s asking from the audience, the apocalyptic AIDS metaphor is only part of what becomes a swirling melodrama about how memory and loss cascade through the eyes of a child. I disagree that there are too many ideas here, they are all closely… more
demi adejuyigbe · 1447 likes
completely get why this isn't hitting with everybody. not only do you walk into this expecting Raw or Titane and get a fairly-grounded drama without any body horror to speak of, but there's a creative choice here that eluded me for so long i thought it was a twist by the time i fully understood it. maybe it was. still not sure. hell, there's a few things i don't fully comprehend about this. but i can't help but love it
Theorus_ (4★) · 856 likes
Alpha wann n’apparaît pas dans le film
Jay (4★) · 819 likes
some absolute batshit choices here you can’t not respect following up titane with a tame impala needle drop
Framesofnick (2.5★) · 795 likes
I hate getting the metaphor disease in the metaphor town fuck
Shares the same director’s fascination with bodily transformation, appetite, and the collision between coming-of-age and horror.
For viewers drawn to Ducournau’s fearless, boundary-pushing approach to identity, grief, and extreme emotional states.
A severe, unsettling family drama about parental dread, alienation, and the terror of not understanding your child.
A restrained, devastating study of family grief and how sudden loss reorganizes a household’s emotional life.
For its aching blend of memory, loss, and emotional unreality, with grief shaping the film’s whole atmosphere.
An expansive, poetic meditation on childhood, memory, mortality, and the way personal grief becomes cosmic.
A bleak family drama about depression, guilt, and the unbearable strain of trying to care for someone in crisis.
A mournful ensemble tragedy about communal grief, blame, and the long afterlife of catastrophe.
A quietly devastating portrait of children forced to survive adult failure and abandonment on their own.
For its hazy, fatalistic view of adolescence, memory, and the unknowability of young lives under pressure.
A strange, intimate character study that treats grief and dissociation with cool, elliptical precision.
A psychologically charged family drama about motherhood, resentment, and the uneasy inheritance of pain.
grief, illness allegory, AIDS crisis, coming of age, family breakdown, addiction, memory and trauma, mother-daughter relationship
art-horror, psychological drama, allegory, bleak, mournful, coming-of-age, family tragedy, AIDS metaphor, body anxiety, festival cinema