This outlandish horror about an Aids-like epidemic is a ‘disorientating, maddening whirlwind’

After winning Parmedollar for the shocking Titan, French director Julia DuCrunau returns to Cannes with another nightmarely strange film, but that’s a dissatisfied watch.

One of the most anticipated titles at this year’s Cannes Film Festival was Alpha, written and directed by Julia Duclunow. The news that she’s back in Cannes due to her final film, “The Graently Bonkers Titane won Palme D’Or in 2021,” was a different cocktail of nasty body horror and traumatic family relationships that made festival attendees excited.

You can see that there are a lot of nightmare weirdness. Alpha is a staggering whirlwind of misguided, misguided crazy, thunderous music and fierce performances, confirming that Ducournau is a visionary artist. But once she recovers from her brain bashing experience of watching her latest film, it seems far more satisfying and exciting than Titane.

Alpha gets the title from the heroine (Melissa Boros), a 13-year-old girl who lives in an unnamed French town along with her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani). She is not particularly rebellious, but one night she comes home from a party with a large capital letter engraved on her arm with a needle the size of a chopstick. Her mother, the doctor, is naturally upset, especially as amateur tattoos may have given Alpha the mystical virus that turns people into stones. Over the course of several months, the patches of skin become hardened, coughing through clouds of dust, and eventually atrophy into a corpse made from polished cracks and creamy white marble. It’s a creepy death, but it’s also oddly beautiful. In effect, the deceased transform into a memorial worthy of their own sparkling cathedral.

Doctors are caring for patients with the virus in an eerie understaffed hospital, but Alpha’s tattoos don’t stop him from gushing blood. The embarrassing pain that encourages her to avoid her. (This is presented as a sly example of bias, but does the kids actually have no points?) But doctors don’t just worry about their daughters and patients. One person who definitely carries the virus is her estranged brother Amin (Tahal Rahim), a mischievous and charismatic drug addict.

Several scenes near the beginning of the Alpha promise that it will become a version of DuCornau from the zombie apocalypse thriller. Paranoia rises to hysteria in hospitals. In hospitals, security guards are struggling to keep infections outside. At school, the school escapes as a swimming pool, it is dyed red with alpha blood. Severe light and calm colors are set in an outline alternative reality that suggests that the end is approaching. The film has sequences reminiscent of everything 28 days later, but Ducornau gives it a unique, unsettling, poetic vibe.

The sad thing is, in the end, she does little to do because of the illness that slumped from the stone. Flying around between two periods (you have to pay attention to Farahani’s haircut to tell which one is), the film unfolds in the 1980s and 90s. The virus is linked to shared needles with gay people. And those who carry the virus, or suspected of having it, are treated with homophobia and ignorance. In short, the scenario is an analogy of the AIDS epidemic; Ducournau admits.

That in itself doesn’t have any problems. Films often use fictional illnesses to comment on actual illnesses. The problem with Alpha is that fictional illnesses do not shed new light on its non-guidance, and that they do not expand it to build a more resonant and universal myth. Philosopher is not rich. The virus is AIDS by another name, and that’s about it. Certainly, for most of the running time, the film is completely separate from the magical realist aspect of the state. The characters seem to forget that they are heading towards the stone. No one has discussed the origins of the virus or potential treatments. The overcrowding and panic caused in the hospital evaporates. What remains for us is an intimate drama about a family of three who are shaking with addiction and illness.

This raises the awful question of why Ducornau was troubled by elements of the science fiction of the film. If Alpha is essentially a film about a doctor who cares for an addict brother and a teenage girl captured between them, why disguise it with magical realism? In the early scenes, the Alpha teacher reads Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, Dreams in Dreams. Soon after, Terry Gilliam’s fantastic adventures in The Van Munchausen are shown on television. But she seems strangely disliked to commit to either fantasy or reality. So, for all the sounds and rage of hallucinating images, it doesn’t mean much. The confused narrative of Amin’s addiction violates insight and plausible details, but also slips through the spine-straightening tales of supernatural fashion.

Ducournau has previously jumped between different genres in her work, but it could have been more powerful if Alpha had stuck to one. Given that she is properly celebrated with her fearless choice, I feel that it’s a bit of a coronavirus that she didn’t try a movie about AIDS that doesn’t envelop it.