I loved the first two films from writer/director Julia Ducournau – RAW (2016) and TITANE (2021) – so of course I went to see her new one, ALPHA. I know it didn’t go over well when it played Cannes last year, and I sort of get that because I felt I didn’t connect with it as much as I did the other two, I didn’t understand it as much. But it’s a special movie. Ducournau paints sickly portraits of a world where flesh is malleable, pain is universal, behavior is extreme, and so is emotion. Any chance to spend two hours seeing through her eyes is a rare cinematic buzz, and as I go back over ALPHA to write about it I’m making new discoveries, it’s sinking in deeper. I urge all Ducournaunauts not to skip it.
I love her matter-of-fact presentation of the bizarre – a sort of magical realism but with weird shit instead of magic. In RAW she had such a persuasive depiction of savage hazing in a veterinarian school that I felt like I should look up if this was a real phenomenon. ALPHA starts with a character seeming to get off on stabbing himself with a tattoo needle, followed by our thirteen year old title protagonist (Mélissa Boros) getting the letter ‘A’ carved into her arm while drunk at a party, so at first I thought we were in for some body modification subcultures. But actually I remember my friends cutting the Dead Kennedys symbol into their arms in middle school, so this is not really science fiction. (I don’t recommend doing that. Good band, though.) (read the rest of this shit…)
