Premiering in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Julia Ducournau’s latest film Alpha arrives with high expectations following her Palme d’Or-winning Titane. But this unsettling sci-fi allegory—centered on a potentially infected tattoo and a mysterious illness—lands with a thud rather than a roar, offering a muddled and heavy-handed metaphor for the AIDS crisis that lacks the clarity and emotional depth needed to resonate.
Set in an undefined near-future, Alpha follows a 13-year-old girl (Mélissa Boros) who returns home from a party with a crude, improvised tattoo. What begins as an act of teenage rebellion soon spirals into a medical and social crisis, as fears of infection erupt in her community. The film uses the girl’s condition as an allegorical device to revisit the trauma and paranoia that defined the early years of the AIDS epidemic.
Ducournau, who has previously explored the intersection of body horror and identity with visceral, confrontational style, again leans into grotesque imagery and social discomfort. But where Titane struck a bold, unpredictable chord, Alpha falters in both narrative focus and thematic execution. Its allegory is at once glaringly overt and frustratingly opaque, failing to deliver the nuance or cohesion necessary for such sensitive subject matter.
The film is one of several recent entries on the festival circuit turning to speculative illness as a lens through which to reexamine the legacy of AIDS—an apparent artistic ripple effect from the collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. While that impulse is understandable, Alpha struggles to strike the right balance between metaphor and message, often collapsing under its own conceptual weight.
Despite committed performances—particularly from young lead Mélissa Boros—the film’s lack of narrative clarity and emotional grounding prevents its central metaphor from truly taking hold. What could have been a powerful exploration of fear, stigma, and adolescence instead feels like a misstep for a filmmaker known for her boldness and vision.
Alpha is ambitious in scope but ultimately disjointed, making it the most exasperating of this year’s high-concept pandemic allegories. It’s a film that gestures at past and present traumas, but never quite finds its voice amidst the noise.
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