Alpha Movie Review
ALPHA
Alpha, 13, is a troubled teenager who lives alone with her mother. Their world comes crashing down the day she comes home from school with a tattoo on her arm.
Film Review
After Grave, then Titane – controversial Palme d’Or in 2021 for a film with undeniable visual ambition, but a shaky script – Julia Ducournau returns with Alpha, presented in official competition at Cannes. Unfortunately, this third feature film fails to clarify the intentions of its director or to elevate her cinematic gesture: we find the flaws already present in Titane, pushed here to their paroxysm, without ever finding the visceral power that at least made Grave unique. This third feature film, eagerly awaited, unfortunately confirms a trend: that of a cinema of excess, more flashy than truly transgressive.
The script quickly becomes confusing, multiplying red herrings, satellite characters, and tonal shifts without managing to weave any real overall coherence. The narrative structure, supposedly fragmented, instead gives the impression of an unfinished project, where each scene seems to struggle against the previous one to impose a meaning. The dialogue, often stiff or unnecessarily hermetic, undermines the little dramatic momentum the story attempts to build.
In terms of the staging, the claimed radicalism too often veers into mannerism. The photography, a uniform gray, struggles to visually convey the characters’ inner selves or the emotional density of the situations. The musical selection, heterogeneous to the point of becoming absurd, interrupts more than it accompanies, and the sound mix—shrill, saturated, sometimes unbearable—contributes to a device that seems to confuse intensity and din.
The actors, most of whom are well-known, struggle to find their place in this floating universe. Lacking a real emotional anchor or precise acting direction, their performances oscillate between excess and emptiness. Some subplots, sketched out and then abandoned, leave a feeling of incompleteness and betray the absence of a truly controlled perspective on the story.
Alpha may have been intended as an organic fable about unfinished grief, therapeutic obstinacy, and the AIDS years. But by abandoning the rigor of the writing in favor of a posture of transgression that has become predictable, Julia Ducournau seems to have strayed into her own obsessions. What could have been a powerful cinematic gesture becomes a confused and pretentious work, where stylistic effect systematically takes precedence over dramatic coherence, and Alpha confirms that radicalism without a compass can quickly come to nothing.