After admiring the audacity and consistency of his cannibal tale Grave (2016), we frankly hated the palmé Titanium (2021), a sort of precipitate of ultra-aggressive WOKE theory and you have me. That we therefore expect the third feature film by Julia Ducournau, Alpha? The least we can say is that the Frenchwoman remains faithful to her inspiration, the fantastic “body horror” side post-David Cronenberg. But while she suffered a heavy return of critical stick to Cannes, where the film was one of the least appreciated in the competition, we will rather admit a flame return! Alpha is certainly a confusing film, but also of an obvious aesthetic mastery, whose dark beauty ends up moving. Closer in this Grave that of Titanium.
For many, the main difficulty will be to distinguish where and when the action is located, a sort of apocalyptic science fiction in which a pandemic transforms infected into marble statues. Except that all this is played rather in the past, in two stages between the 1980s and 1990s, the allegory of AIDS soon becoming obvious in a context of Maghreb immigration in the French suburbs. But we can just as easily let go of a certain nightmare confusion, apparently wanted by the filmmaker herself before clarifying a little things at the end.
