The place is France and the time is a very near future. Fourteen-year-old Alpha (Melissa Boros) lives with her doting mother (Golshifteh Farahani). Their extend family includes an Arabic-speaking grandmother (with whom Alpha cannot communicate due to a language barrier) and a few aunts. One day, dishevelled and scrawny uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim) seeks shelter in Alpha’s house, but the adolescent nearly throws him out. That’s because she cannot remember him. That changes after her mother reassures the teenager that the invasive man is not lying.
Mother is a doctor in a large hospital. She’s virtually on her own. All staff have left following a pandemic that slowly turns the infected into marble-like stone. The origins of the strange condition are never revealed, in a highly poetic and allegorical movie more concerned with crafting impressive and symbolisms than with coherence. What is clear is that the virus spreads through sexual contact and sharing needles, much like HIV, and that the prognosis is always death. A man fully turned into statue on a hospital bed, with drips and needles still attached to his body, is a harbinger of the fate of other patients. Their bodies gradually turns white and grey, with the least mobile areas (skull, jaw, shoulders) typically first affected. Their breath becomes steamy, suggesting that their internal temperature is as low as the Alps.
At school, Alpha is beginning to discover her sexuality. She has a brief romance with a boy in her class, but sex might be just too much of a stretch with such nasty virus going around. Their English teacher (Finnegan Oldfield) places a lot of faith in Alpha’s intellectual skills. On the other hand, her bleeding arm – from a tattoo that simply refuses to heal – drives the adolescent into increasing isolation.
Despite the gruesome body horror veneer, Alpha is a parable of love and abandonment. It uses marble as a gauge of love and devotion. Love is visceral. Abandonment is dry and brittle, just like marble. Lonely people can easily break, or chip. Those who truly love never abandon the ill, and they never experience repulsion – however sickly and repugnant the body of their loves ones becomes. We routinely turn those for whom we have no affection into stone. The truly sick lack tenderness and attention. They ache for warmth (in Alpha, this acquires a literal and also a metaphorical connotation).
There are other messages, including an apparent riff on assisted suicide and the right to die. Ducournau seems to suggest that we should respect the wishes of those who want to depart, and are no longer in the position to take their own lives. A scene in which Alpha bleeds profusely from her arm in the school’s swimming pool, only to see other students swim away in panic seems to be a comment on menstruation. The 41-year-old French filmmaker is no stranger to bodily scares: her first film Raw (2017) deals with a cannibalistic vegan, while her Palme d’Or winning sophomore feature Titane (2021) deals with severe disfigurement. Her third feature – while not as accomplished as the first two movies – establishes Ducournau as the World Queen of Body Horror. She is how firmly nailed to the throne, with the metal attachments screwed directly into her body, and her feet cemented to the floor.
The production design is hauntingly beautiful, and the cinematography fittingly gloomy. The gently distorted marble statues, still with functioning mouths and eyes, are impressive. Some of sick the opt for a partly functioning life. A club dancer whose legs have fully morphed into marble shocks an unsuspecting Alpha with her heavy feet thudding. The final scene also boasts an exquisite allure, with our protagonists trapped in an inexplicable sand storm, and a very strange type of redemption and closure.
Music is an integral part of the film. The story opens to Portishead’s Roads, and an acoustic version of Nick Cave’s The Mercy Seat (played in its integrity) provides the backdrop to one of the story’s most dramatic scenes. A piano rendition of Beethoven’s Symphony No.7 in A major – a favourite amongst filmmakers (one such example is the closing of Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, from 2002) – wraps the story gracefully. The outcome is a little sordid and a little adolescent. The horror, on the other hand, is most psychological. The marble people are never scary. This is a movie to be marvelled and enjoyed, not one that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
Alpha premiered in the Official Competition of 78th Cannes International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. In cinemas on Friday, November 14th. On all major VoD platforms on Monday December, 8th.
