The term “body horror” is one that carries with it a lot of expectations. If you were to hear it at last year’s Cannes, it would have likely been used in reference to the breakout hit “The Substance,” with its gallons of bloody viscera being splashed all over the screen. But there are also the works of body horror that rely less on external spectacle. Take Julia Ducournau’s quietly flooring “Alpha,” the knockout follow-up to her Palme d’Or-winning “Titane.”
While similar in many regards to her first two features, “Raw” and “Titane,” in terms of how it’s intimately attuned to characters trying to find their way in an imbalanced world, it’s also the least violent. Rather than be about the bloody bites of a young woman discovering a taste for human flesh or the more discomforting yet oddly sweet journey of a loner finding a chosen family, this one is about the profound, often overwhelming feeling of losing someone to a disease that consumes them from the inside out. Though this may prove somewhat disappointing to those hoping for more of what they’ve seen from her before, Ducournau is not here to follow a familiar path. Instead, she pushes us and herself as a filmmaker into something deeper, creating her most exciting, emotional, existential and eviscerating work yet. It tears through the soul, along with some flesh.
Premiering Monday in the festival’s main competition, it all centers on the teenage Alpha (a terrific Mélissa Boros in what is only her second feature) after she has gotten the world’s worst stick and poke tattoo. When she comes home bearing the giant letter A on her arm, her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani) is concerned about what she may have gotten from the tattooist’s needle. Her fear stems from a disease that we get glimpses of when she goes into work to care for the ill. Everyone else seems terrified of contracting this unnamed disease, but she is doing all she can to treat those who need it. When her ailing uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim) returns into Alpha’s life, she’ll find herself confronting a death that has come knocking at their door.
The results of the disease, which turns people into what resembles marble, are as visually striking as they are emotionally devastating. The combination of remarkable prosthetics and visual effects work makes you fully believe every smooth texture of their bodies that are simultaneously decaying yet also becoming monuments of sorts. The more the film explores this disease, the more it becomes clear, as Ducournau has said, it is drawing from her own experience growing up during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s. It’s a film of many things, but it’s also about how fear and stigma can only exacerbate harm.
As Alpha goes about her days at school, the frequently bleeding tattoo on her arm gets worse as they await test results, and her classmates begin to target her. They take every chance they can to dehumanize her. One scene sees her brutally attacked by a peer in the school’s pool, nearly drowning her. When she cracks her head on the side of the pool, blood spreads and the students flee. The most chilling horror of the set piece is that nobody goes to help Alpha. In the eyes of everyone else, it’s as if she is already dead.
As Alpha’s family becomes increasingly isolated, the film’s ambition widens. Though the rhythms of this can take some getting used to, the resulting emotional payoff is more than worth your patience. While she technically knew him as a child, Alpha doesn’t remember her uncle and gets to know him all over again. As she and Amin grow closer and he gets sicker, Ducournau creates moments of genuine grace. It’s a film of boundless humanity just as it confronts the horrors that come from life being ripped away. Thus, when Ducournau leans into the body horror, the care given to the people underneath it is what makes it resonate.
There is a crushing terror to the film, most certainly, but it is also balanced with an enduring sense of compassion. “Alpha” is a work about remembering the beauty and pain of the people that are lost to us as well as the impact they had on those who loved them. Cinematographer Ruben Impens, who also served on Ducournau’s previous films, immerses his audience in every scene and creates a growing intensity that culminates in one of the most breathtaking finales of Ducournau’s career to date.
Without robbing the conclusion of its power, it cements “Alpha” as a gutting triumph of empathy just as it is tragedy. From one final emotionally gutting look that becomes frozen in time to the fading away of all that someone ever was, Ducournau finds beauty in the eye of death. She does so not by hiding away from the destruction that consumes so many, but by remembering who it is that they were to those who loved them.
While her previous films have confronted death and a way of enduring despite it all, “Alpha” is the moment Ducaournau has made something immortal.
