Turn to Stone: Ducournau Hits a Wall with Disease Allegory
“Death is the cure for all illness,” wrote English writer Thomas Browne, which is a sentiment one can apply to Alpha, the third film from budding body horror extraordinaire Julia Ducournau—for the end credits at last release one from its tightly wound, nonsensical battering. Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winning Titane (read review) was destined to be a hard act to follow, and the anxiety to provide a similar sense of howling wonder is apparent in almost every aspect of a fragmented allegory about diseases, both social and physical. An ambiguously troubled teen gets a tattoo while drunk at a party, an event which sends both herself and her painstakingly empathetic mother into an immediate psychotic break. Meanwhile, Ducournau applies all the tricks of the trade to convince us of greater meaning.
Alpha (Mélissa Boros) is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives in a dreary world which survived a shocking epidemic sometime in the recent past. She comes home to her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor, drunk out of her mind. As her mother undresses her, she is alarmed to see a large letter A tattooed on Alpha’s arm, acquired at the party she’d just left. Immediately, her mother announces they must get Alpha’s blood tested to see if she has been infected with a deadly, unnamed disease (the results of which take two weeks). On the same night, Alpha overhears her mother talking to a stranger in the kitchen, which turns out to be her long lost uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim). It would appear the extremely strung out Amin has arrived to attempt sobriety with the assistance of his sister. At school, Alpha’s open wound causes immediate concern amongst her peers, who are worried she is indeed infected. Flashes to an earlier time find a virus ravaging the populace, turning those infected into stone. While it would seem Alpha’s in the clear, she’s an instant pariah, inciting violence amongst her classmates. Meanwhile, uncle Amin, with whom she begins to bond, seems to be hurtling towards a destructive reckoning her mother wants to avoid at all costs.
The formidably rigid narrative paralysis of Alpha sets in almost immediately, and the film itself seems to be suffering from the same virus which caused, assumedly, a global crisis, turning its victims into glossy marbled stone, entombed in their own calcified form. The scale of what appears to have been an epidemic quite similar to the AIDS virus (as we learn it’s spread through sex and dirty needles—thankfully not through aerosol droplets with Farahani’s tendency to become carelessly intimate with her bedridden patients) is never defined, which lends a nagging sloppiness to the film. Based on the juxtaposed hairstyles of Farahani and her colleague Emma Mackey (curiously neglected here), it becomes apparent we’re migrating at random between the present, where the pandemic has been assuaged, and the past, where it began to overwhelm infrastructures. However, the threat of a return or a new strain remains based on how Alpha’s bleeding wound is treated at school by her classmates.
Fear mongering and rampant paranoia, the aftershocks of the crisis, dictates behavior. But it would appear there’s no need to quarantine Alpha until her test results confirm a diagnosis, while the teacher’s at school are willfully oblivious (like all troubled teen films) about the threat of physical violent to Alpha, as evidenced by a surprisingly muted stand-off during physical education in the school pool. Assumedly a vaccine exists since Alpha potentially exposing her classmates to disease is not a concern. What makes even less sense is where the film begins considering how Farahani, a medical professional, decided it was a good idea to allow her five-year-old child to be left in the care of a drug addicted brother whose degradation is so severe a child can play connect-the-dots on his arm with a magic marker.
The allegorical sentiments are meaningful, considering Ducournau is revisiting the abandonment of the LGBTQ+ community for the first several years of the AIDS crisis, but this empathetic gesture is fleeting, for there’s no real subversive element here. Taking a step back to surmise what’s going on, even if metaphorical, people have been turning into rock formations, no one knows what to do about, two women stay behind to treat an endless parade of victims while all their other colleagues bail, and then somehow, medical relief changed the course of a disease which is itself more interesting than any of the characters we meet dealing with or affected by it.
Whereas in Titane, Ducournau was able to effectively blend her soundtrack into the mise-en-scene, in Alpha we have large blocks of running time set to blaring music, often with characters simply running back and forth. It’s as if the film is afraid of stillness, to distract us from pondering, trying to delay us from the realization of what’s happening even though it’s fairly evident early on. Even a scene with Alpha’s extended family over a meal is eclipsed entirely by frantic piano, making us anxious while glossing over cliched familial exchanges.
Alpha herself fades into the background from the storyline, which outside of her bland schoolmates, seems to prize everyone else’s perspective but her own. Finnegan Oldfield appears as a mournful teacher trying to inspire his class to dissect that old Edgar Allen Poe nut “all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream,” clearly the key to this Lewis Carroll styled nightmare, which feels like Alpha in the Underworld. Likewise, Ducournau has lassoed Nathaniel Hawthorne into the mix, a mutated Hester and Pearl Prynne for a new century of shifting disgraceful mores.
Moreso an exploration of guilt and grief between a brother and sister, Golshifteh Farahani manages to uplift a handful of moments, a master of emoting even when thrown the most barrenly staged or repetitive motivations. Tahar Rahim has transformed himself into a withered specter of a man, his physical presence often shocking, which makes the failures of Alpha and its inability to coalesce all the more disappointing. Like Ducournau’s previous works, including her cannibal carnage debut Raw (2016), she’s clearly interested in mining severe attachment and abandonment issues between troubled family members, picking apart and glueing together kinship roles all while heightening her own lofty, imaginative explorations of body horror, where disease and deterioration transform her characters into other forms, sometimes non-human. Here, the intriguing evolutions are inert, ironically thematic considering the limiting thrust of the film.
Reviewed on May 19th at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival (78th edition) – Competition. 128 Mins.
★/☆☆☆☆☆
