Credits: Canal22 / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 3.0.
With Alpha, Julia Ducournau returns to competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Four years after Titane, the French filmmaker tackles a painful chapter 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 confronted with the fear of contamination, social rejection and ever-present death.
The story opens on a scene both ordinary and unsettling. Alpha gets a tattoo from a classmate. The needle is dirty, the movement clumsy. Thus begins a descent into a world eaten away by a mysterious virus, where the invisible becomes embodied in every everyday gesture. This imaginary contamination clearly evokes the collective psychosis that accompanied the HIV crisis in the 1980s and 1990s.
Julia Ducournau, born in 1983 in Paris, did not live through that era directly. However, she inherited its scars, silences and archival images. She transposes this memory into a stylized, organic work where fear mixes with a quest for love and recognition. By treating this subject from a child’s point of view, she shows that collective traumas infiltrate family stories. In doing so, she also recalls their impact on intimate narratives.
The Recumbents: Between Memory, Sacralization and Psychoanalysis
Alpha transforms its dead into marble statues. A powerful image, almost religious. 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. “Those deaths, I wanted to make them beautiful,” she admits at a press conference in Cannes.
This visual sacralization summons the recumbent syndrome, a psychoanalytic concept developed by Anne Ancelin Schützenberger. It designates lives haunted by unfinished griefs, forgotten deaths, silent transmissions. The film thus becomes an imaginary mausoleum, a tribute to the disappeared bodies absent from official narratives.
Already in Grave and Titane, Ducournau explored bodily mutations, invisible wounds, monstrous hybridizations. Daughter of a gynecologist and a dermatologist, she uses medical language with clinical precision. This precision permeates her aesthetic. The body is never reduced to a shell: it is memory, territory, symptom.
A Teenage Heroine in a Contaminated World
Alpha, 13, is an ambivalent heroine. She embodies rage, identity confusion and the vulnerability of adolescence. Played by Mélissa Boros, she moves through the story with a dull, almost animal intensity. In addition, she must face her mother, a devoted hospital doctor played soberly by Golshifteh Farahani, and her drug-addicted uncle, portrayed by a gaunt, hallucinatory Tahar Rahim.
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. Makeup effects, pale lighting and skin textures evoke an almost post-apocalyptic atmosphere. However, some visual choices can disorient the viewer, as the film alternates between raw realism and morbid dreaminess.
The Ducournau Style: Radical, Organic, Controversial
Since Grave, Julia Ducournau has been seen as an essential figure of French genre cinema. Her style is recognizable a mile away: a sensory narration, radical direction, 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 unanimously accepted. Some critics denounce a kind of morbid aestheticism, a tendency toward cheap shock. Yet Ducournau claims a strong intellectual grounding. She positions herself in the line of psychological horror cinema, from David Cronenberg to Lars von Trier, while borrowing from melodrama and the coming-of-age tale.
A Work Between Cult and Controversy
The reception of Alpha is expected to be mixed. 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 that remains very male, she also faces criticism. Indeed, some accuse her of a certain emotional coldness.
But that 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, to death, to 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 inheritance. It remains to be seen whether this work will mark a turning point in her career. It could lead to more stripping down or, conversely, a radicalization of her vision.
Alpha will be released theatrically on August 20, 2025. A film that will no doubt spur debates, analyses and controversies. French cinema, for its part, gains an increasingly singular voice.