You know the French director Julia Ducournau for some hyper-specific things: her grisly debut Raw, about a veterinarian student who forgoes her veggie diet when she discovers she loves the taste of raw flesh. Or 2021’s Palme d’Or-winning Titane, in which a murderous woman fucks a car, goes on the run, and discovers she’s pregnant—with the car’s baby. So when Alpha, the director’s third feature, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, audiences had a sense of what to expect. Arguably, none of those expectations were met.
In some ways, Alpha is everything and nothing like a Julia Ducournau film. In the past, she’s drawn comparisons to (and praise from) David Cronenberg, whose nastiest work is often offset by a revelatory human streak. Alpha is Ducournau’s most grounded and sombre film by a long shot, with her trademark gnarly violence mostly absent. Instead, we get a story that is unequivocally about the AIDS crisis, and how a relationship forms between a rebellious young girl and her drug-addicted uncle, despite decades of difference between them.
Alpha is our 13-year-old protagonist, and we meet her at what feels like the only moment this film could be described as ‘Cronenberg meets Christiane F.’. It’s 1990, and in a room full of joint-smoking, stick-and-poke-tattooing teenage vagrants, she’s having her initial seared onto her skin in permanent black ink. She’s careless and mostly unconcerned—until she gets home and shows it to her mother, a doctor who worries her daughter might have contracted tetanus or something more incurable through a dirty needle. A disease has ravaged drug-users and the gay community; Alpha might have fallen into its grasp too.
Soon after, a man Alpha hasn’t seen since she was a very young girl shows up at her door—emaciated, his skin pocked with track marks. His name is Amin. He’s her uncle. With both now staying under the same roof, Alpha’s mother faces the possibility of losing two family members to the same disease. Simultaneously, we look back at Amin’s own descent into drugs—through the eyes of both a very young Alpha and her mother, who’s haunted by what’s to come. The two timelines play out like a hall of trick mirrors, overlapping and twisting around each other, to show how little time really changes.
“It’s by far Ducournau’s bleakest film, relentlessly so”
The film unfurls with few of Ducournau typical hallmarks, save for one plotline: Alpha experiences the disgust of her classmates who are convinced she’s caught the disease. In one scene, Alpha swims away from her bullies, faster and faster, until she cracks her head on the pool tiles and bleeds—sending everyone screaming and scrambling out of the water.
Her movies have always been about the othered, and what it feels like to experience loneliness. But in Alpha, there’s less of a sense of empowerment or liberation, and more one of empathy for these characters—mother, brother, daughter—who find themselves in such dire circumstances. It’s by far Ducournau’s bleakest film, relentlessly so. Watching it gives you a grief headache; the subject matter soaks every frame.
Detractors have called the film’s “allegory” too literal—just another AIDS story in a time oversaturated with them. As if there could be a quota on art about the AIDS crisis.. But to me the film isn’t an allegory about AIDS at all—it simply is a film about it. With one slight Ducournau-ism: those suffering from the disease slowly turn into gorgeous marble statues, their blood becoming fine red sand. It’s an act of honoring the dead I found tragic and moving.
In preparing for the film, Ducournau spent time researching ACT UP, the New York-based AIDS activist group that demanded government action for those suffering from HIV and AIDS. Her films have often felt like exercises in power and survival. But here, she tackles the inevitability of death, resigns herself to it, and explores how loss is something impossible to truly process. After winning the biggest prize in arthouse cinema, this is the bravest thing a director could do: mine something personal, and make unapologetic, prophetic, and excellent art from it.
‘Alpha’ premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2025 and will be released by Neon (US) and Curzon (UK) later this year.