With Alpha, Julia Ducournau returns to competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Four years after Titane, the French filmmaker tackles a painful aspect of contemporary history: the AIDS years. Her new film, halfway between body horror, intimate tragedy, and political allegory, follows Alpha, a 13-year-old girl facing the fear of contamination, social rejection, and omnipresent death.
The story opens with a scene that is both mundane and unsettling. Alpha is getting a tattoo from a friend. The needle is dirty, the gesture clumsy. Thus begins a descent into a world ravaged by a mysterious virus, where the invisible manifests in every daily gesture. This imaginary contamination directly evokes the collective psychosis that accompanied the HIV crisis in the 1980s and 1990s.
Julia Ducournau, born in 1983 in Paris, did not directly experience this era. However, she inherited its stigmas, silences, and archival images. She transposes this memory into a stylized, organic work where fear mingles with a quest for love and recognition. By addressing this subject from a child’s perspective, she shows that collective traumas infiltrate family stories. Thus, she also highlights their impact on intimate narratives.
The Recumbents: Between Memory, Sacralization, and Psychoanalysis
Alpha transforms its dead into marble statues. A strong, almost religious image. For Julia Ducournau, these frozen bodies recall the recumbents of medieval cathedrals. Thus, she elevates the forgotten of the AIDS years to the rank of sacred figures, sublimated by the camera. “I wanted to make these dead beautiful,” she confides during a press conference in Cannes.
This visual sacralization invokes the recumbent syndrome, a psychoanalytic concept developed by Anne Ancelin Schützenberger. It refers to lives haunted by unresolved grief, forgotten deaths, silent transmissions. The film then becomes an imaginary mausoleum, a tribute to the disappeared bodies, absent from official narratives.
Already in Raw and Titane, Ducournau explored bodily mutations, invisible wounds, monstrous hybridizations. The daughter of a gynecologist and a dermatologist, she uses medical language with clinical precision. Thus, this precision permeates her aesthetic. The body is never reduced to its envelope: it is memory, territory, symptom.
A Teenage Heroine in a Contaminated World
Alpha, 13 years old, is an ambivalent heroine. She embodies the rage, identity confusion, and vulnerability of adolescence. Portrayed by Mélissa Boros, she moves through the story with a muted, almost animal intensity. Moreover, she must face her mother, a dedicated hospital doctor, played with sobriety by Golshifteh Farahani, and her drug-addicted uncle, portrayed by a Tahar Rahim who is emaciated and hallucinated.
Around her, society collapses under the weight of fear. Medical institutions seem overwhelmed. School becomes a place of stigmatization. The urban environment is dirty, bleak, suffocating. The makeup effects, the pale light, and the skin textures evoke an almost post-apocalyptic atmosphere. However, some visual choices may disorient the viewer, as the film alternates between raw realism and morbid dreaminess.
The Ducournau Style: Radical, Organic, Controversial
Since Raw, Julia Ducournau has been seen as an essential figure in French genre cinema. Her style is unmistakable: a sensory narrative, radical staging, bodies that bleed, mutate, or scream without warning. With Alpha, she continues this path while expanding it to more social themes: collective memory, fear of exclusion, transmission of trauma.
This visceral cinema is not universally accepted. Some critics denounce a form of morbid aestheticism, a tendency for easy shock. Yet, Ducournau claims a strong intellectual grounding. She follows in the tradition of psychological horror cinema, from David Cronenberg to Lars von Trier, while borrowing from the codes of melodrama and the coming-of-age tale.
A Work Between Cult and Controversy
The reception of Alpha promises to be divided. While the film intrigues with its bold proposition, it can also unsettle with its narrative complexity. Julia Ducournau, already a Palme d’Or winner in 2021, continues to divide. Praised as a female pioneer in an extreme cinema still very male-dominated, she also receives criticism. Indeed, some accuse her of a certain emotional coldness.
But this rigor may be her greatest strength. In an era saturated with smooth images, Ducournau offers a rough, unclassifiable, deeply political work. She questions our relationship to the body, death, and memory. She pushes the viewer out of their comfort zone to better awaken a buried memory.
With Alpha, she extends her reflection on maternal figures, invisible scars, and fear as heritage. It remains to be seen whether this work will mark a turning point in her career. It could lead to more stripping down or, on the contrary, a radicalization of her vision.
Alpha will be released in theaters on August 20, 2025. A film that will undoubtedly spark debates, analyses, and controversies. French cinema, for its part, gains an ever more singular voice.