With “Alpha”, Julia Ducournau signs a family drama against the backdrop of a global epidemic – rts.ch

In a world where the population is struck by a strange epidemic. Nevertheless, transforming the patients into a marble statue, Alpha (Mélissa Boros), 13, is raised alone by her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), an overwhelmed doctor. For example, The day the teenager returns with a tattoo on her arm. her mother panic and, at school, Alpha is sidelined by her comrades, convinced that she is sick. What’s more. Amin (Tahar Rahim), his uncle Junkie, comes back to settle in her house and her mother, resuscitating trauma buried for years.

After her golden “alpha”, julia ducournau signs family palm in 2021 for “Titane”. Julia Ducournau is interested in her third feature film in the history of a family confronted with a global epidemic. Located at the turn of the 1980s. 1990s, thus stressing the reference to AIDS, “Alpha” poses a very dark, baroque look, on a society ravaged by its unsaid, a world where traumas are transmitted as a virus.

The visceral staging of the French director. accompanied by Portishead classics or Nick Cave, is always dazzling with crimson beauty, focused on bodies, rachitic like that of Tahar Rahim, minerals like “alpha”, julia ducournau signs family those of the sick.

Fulgurances lost in a draft – "alpha", julia ducournau signs family

But unlike his previous films. which dug the same narrative furrow until dizzying radicality, we cannot help finding this terribly scattered “alpha”. Between the sexual awakening of the teenager who flirts with a fleeing boyfriend. the back and forth between the 5 -year -old girl and that of 13 years, the family circle raising the question of the Berber origins, the dependence on uncle’s drugs, the homosexuality of a teacher teacher from Edgar Allan Poe to recalcitrant students (“everything we see or believe Dream “) and the overall epidemic, we have the feeling of attending stories which, instead of overlapping, end up parasitizing.

And when the story gets carried away in a rereading of the past of Alpha. his mother and his uncle, juggingly juggling with the real and the phantasmagorical, we frankly pick up a film of which we only keep a few “alpha”, julia ducournau signs family flashes lost in a draft whole.

Note: 2/5

Rafael Wolf/Eye

“Alpha” by Julia Ducournau, with Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani, Mélissa Boros. To see in the French -speaking rooms since August 20, 2025.