Alpha review: 'an ambitious psychological drama'
An extraordinary finale helps Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau’s film transcend its frustrations, writes Alistair Harkness
Alpha (15) ★★★
With Alpha, French auteur Julia Ducournau follows up her Palme d’Or winner Titane with a more sedate, but no less abstract and ambitious, psychological drama about familial dysfunction.
Set in a recent unspecified past across two timelines (soundtrack cues suggest it straddles the 1990s and early 2000s), the story takes shape around 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros), a French school girl of Algerian descent whose doctor mother (played by Golshifteh Farahani) we see in copper-tinted flashbacks caring for patients suffering from a mysterious new blood-borne disease that turns sufferers into marble.
In the more recent timeline, though, Alpha’s mother is more pre-occupied with the makeshift tattoo someone has inflicted on her daughter while passed out drunk at a party. Putting Alpha at increased risk of contracting this mysterious virus, the infected tattoo leads to ostracisation at school, but also coincides with the sudden re-appearance of Alpha’s junky uncle, Amin (Tahar Rahim), whom she hasn’t seen since she was five, and whose strong sibling bond with Alpha’s mother manifests itself in frequent life-saving interventions every time he overdoses.
Though we can read the marbling disease as an Aids metaphor, Ducournau certainly can’t be accused of spoon-feeding audiences here. Nevertheless, an early reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s A Dream Within a Dream unlocks some larger themes while giving us permission not to take the film’s slippery structure too literally. And a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clip of Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen hints at what’s really going on between mother and daughter, with Ducournau using what used to be called Munchausen’s by proxy as a way to explore Alpha’s mother’s reluctance to let go of her own childhood trauma, inflicting it instead on Alpha to compensate for past failings regarding Amin.
If Ducournau sometimes struggles to make the drama compelling enough to follow such narrative breadcrumbs, her extraordinary finale helps the film transcend its frustrations.
Alpha is in cinemas from 14 November
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