‘Alpha’ review: Julia Ducournau's ‘Titane’ follow-up is set against a mysterious French plague

Dir/scr: Julie Ducornau. France. 2025. 128mins

Julie Ducornau is full of surprises. With her first two features, Raw and Titane, she established herself as one of Europe’s most original new directing talents. Titane, which scooped the Palme d’Or in 2021, was a body horror which had a story about families nestling somewhere in its viscera. Alpha turns the formula inside out, centering a family drama against the background of an unnamed plague that closely resembles the AIDS epidemic.

An emotional heart beneath a veneer of horror-tinged genre elements

Bodily transformation and laceration are by no means absent, but they serve to tease out and layer the emotion. Alpha is teeming with ideas, even if not all of them mesh in a story that uses some old-school auditory persuasions to try to win us around. While Titane was a critically lauded and much-awarded arthouse genre movie that didn’t quite live up to its box office potential, Alpha could go in the opposite direction. Its boldness is perhaps more commercially viable, with Ducornau targeting an emotional heart  beneath a veneer of horror-tinged genre elements. 

Set across two time frames in  the 1980s and 1990s – the connection between which will gradually be revealed – this is essentially the story of a fatherless 13-year-old girl named Alpha, played with presence and assurance by relative newcomer Melissa Boros. Alpha is coping with the stuff all insecure teens go through, but it’s made worse by the fact that she may have caught something from an amateur tattooist’s needle, and by the arrival of the emaciated guy who turns up one day in the flat she shares with her mother, a hospital doctor (Golshifteh Farahani). He is mum’s long estranged heroin addict brother, and actor Tahar Rahim goes through an incredible physical transformation – only part of which can be ascribed to make-up – to catch an addict’s curvature, his hungry look, his veer between aching desperation and chilled-out affability. 

The Rahim-Boros pairing provides some of Alpha’s most affecting moments, in which danger and tenderness alternate and coexist. This young girl comes from a Berber family living in France, yet she has never learned the language her mother and uncle use when they don’t want her to understand. This and a reference to a supposed Berber folk belief in a ‘red wind’ that steals the soul – figured in a striking closing scene set in a bland, boxy housing estate – is another theme thrown in to an already heady mix.

When the story that she might be infected spreads around school, Alpha is bullied and ostracised. The punishment she takes is expressed physically in the ugly anarchist-style ‘A’ tattoo etched into her arm at a party, by the blood-test jabs her mother sends her to have, by seeping wounds and a nasty head injury in the school swimming pool. There’s a nicely intimate side to Ducornau’s urge to dig beneath the flesh here, a ‘soft body horror’ simulacrum of the hormonal changes this adolescent girl is going through.

Alpha does have one very striking special effects card to play: the epidemic that features in the film, which is blood-borne and affects homosexuals and drug users, makes its sufferers gradually harden and turn to marble and their breath emerge as frost. Watching this transformation in action is fascinating. With its allusion to classical statuary and Greek myths of metamorphosis, it feels like an ennobling tribute to those who often died reviled and rejected. But it’s also a flashy talking point tacked on to a story that might have lost nothing without it.