Crew
Director/Screenplay – Julia Ducournau, Producers – Eric Altmayer, Nicolas Altmayer, Arnaud Chautard & Jean-Rachid, Photography – Ruben Impens, Music – Jim Williams, Visual Effects – Mac Guff (Supervisor – Martial Vallanchon), Makeup Effects – Olivier Afonso, Production Design – Emmanuelle Duplay. Production Company – Frakas Productions/RTBF/Proximus/Orange/BE TV/France 3 Cinema/Canal+/Cine+/OCS/France Televisions/Diaphana/Cofinova 22/Indiefilms 14/Cofimage 36/Flimnation Entertainment/Charades.
Cast
Melissa Boros (Alpha), Golshifteh Farahani (Maman), Tahar Ramin (Amin), Louai El Amrousy (Adrien), Emma Mackey (Nurse), Finnegan Oldfield (English Professor), Ambrine Trigo-Quaked (Alpha Age 5), Zohra Benbetka (Grandmother), Marc Riso (Benny)
Plot
Thirteen-year-old Alpha returns from a party with someone having given her a tattoo of the letter A while she was passed out. Her mother, a doctor of Berber background, is concerned and insists that Alpha get tested immediately for infection. At work, Alpha’s mother deals with a ward of people who have a new epidemic that is slowly calcifying their bodies. Alpha is upset to return home and find that her mother’s brother Amin, a recovering junkie, has moved into the house with them and that she must share a room with him. At school, when Alpha begins to bleed from her tattoo, she is ostracised by the other children and then expelled from the school over fear of infection.
In recent years, French director Julia Ducournau has courted controversy with her first two films Raw (2016) where a vegetarian teenager becomes obsessed with cannibalism and the equally out there Titane (2021) about a woman who becomes pregnant after having sex with a car. Alpha was her third film.
Ducournau’s previous films have been firmly rooted in horror and have pushed transgressive barriers. Alpha falls more into being a science-fictional film about a strange pandemic. It is less about shock value and more about people adjusting to a strange condition in their midst. You suspect that the film had its gestation in the 2020-2 Covid-19 pandemic. Quite what the infection is – or for that matter even how it is spread – is never explained.
The scene where Melissa Boros gets a tattoo and all manner of hints about it being potentially dangerous pushes Alpha for a time into seeming in the company of the likes of The X Files episode Never Again (1997) and the films The Tattooist (2007) and Comforting Skin (2011) about possessed tattoos. Instead, Julia Ducournau gives us a slow, building character driven film. (In fact, the tattoo and her potential infection is forgotten by the film’s second half). We are dropped into Melissa Boros’s Berber family, her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) toiling as a doctor and the appearance of her mother’s brother (Tahar Ramin) as a struggling addict. The film extends beyond that to show the wider family during their reunion dinners. All of the key actors give strong and credible performances.
Alpha becomes quite eerie in the scenes where we tour the ward of the hospital where Golshifteh Farahani works and see people infected with something that leaves their face gleaming, before we come to someone whose entire body has calcified. There are other effective scenes like where Golshifteh is letting patients in and we see the crowd filled with infectees in various stages. Although the creepiest scene is the one where Golshifteh is examining her brother Tahar Ramin and picks at a piece of skin on his back, only for a big chunk of his back to fall off. There is also an evocative ending where she takes Tahar out of the city and allows his dying body to be consumed by the dust storms there.
Trailer here