Alpha review: Titane director Julia Ducournau's latest is undercooked and asinine

But despite some startling visuals and performances, especially by Tahar Rahim, this latest body horror feels undercooked, with its conceit never fully fleshed out, to the point where it becomes confusing and, worse, uninteresting.

Premiering in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Alpha begins as the eponymous 13-year-old (Mélissa Boros) returns home with a crude tattoo on her arm. This poorly-drawn ‘A’, her very own Scarlett Letter you might say, leaves her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) apoplectic.

With good reason, she’s concerned that the needle might be infected (“Was it clean or dirty?” she screams), and soon hurries her to a hospital for a tetanus shot (where Sex Education star Emma Mackey, speaking her role in French, plays the kindly nurse).

With Ducournau’s script a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, or maybe even COVID-19, the backstory soon unfolds. Alpha’s mother is a doctor treating patients with a virus of sorts that calcifies their ashen-like bodies.

As it turns out, her drug-addict brother Amin (Rahim) went through this, and the film moves back, dream-like, to eight years earlier, when Alpha was five and Amin even looked after his niece. Clearly, Alpha looked up to Amin, although it seems impossible for him to be the responsible figure she wants. “I’m not your father,” he says.

Rahim, the actor best known for Jacques Audiard’s immense prison drama A Prophet, truly commits to his role. His frame looks skeletal and cadaver-like, as if he’s followed the likes of Christian Bale (The Machinist) and Joaquin Phoenix (Joker), losing around 20 kilos by his own admission.

“Handsome as ever,” jokes his sister, but it’s a striking appearance. There’s no doubt he did everything he could, physically, for the role. So it’s a little sad that all that effort goes to waste with an end result that doesn’t merit it.

Is this ultimately a coming-of-age drama? Maybe. At one point, Farahani’s mother says “I want us to be an average family.” But it seems in this world, some kind of alternate France set in the late 1990s, that simply isn’t possible.

At least visually there is something to look at (if not exactly admire). Again, Ducournau works with Ruben Impens, her cinematographer from Belgium, who previously shot Raw and Titane and here adopts a gloomy, inky palette for the scenes set in the film’s present.

There’s also a lot of strange, rust-coloured sequences, which really don’t make a whole heap of sense. But then amid all the other bizarre scenes, that hardly seems to matter to Ducournau, who seems to be in her own world here.

More reviews from the Cannes Film Festival:

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She is certainly the natural successor to David Cronenberg, and never compromises her vision. But this is a wayward and muddled work that more feels like sketches of ideas than a coherent whole. By the end, you’ll be craving the simplicity of Raw, Ducournau’s debut which dealt with cannibalism.

The young Boros is intriguing to watch, at least, and the Iranian actress Farahani (who Jim Jarmusch fans will remember from Paterson) bonds well with her. But it isn’t enough to pull you through.

Destined to divide and polarise, some genre fans with extreme tastes may find Alpha just the ticket. But for most, it’ll be a trial. While it’s a film that deals with intergenerational trauma, the trauma is likely to be for those who sit through this.

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