Summer Scarefest: Watch the French Film ‘Alpha’

Summer is a time for light cinematic fare: silly comedies, rom-coms, musicals. But to mix things up, count on a scarefest or two, as well. Alpha was directed by Julia Ducournau, who won attention with her second film, Titane. It tells the story of a 13-year-old girl, Alpha (Mélissa Boros), inadvertently tattooed at a party, whose life changes in consequence. Her situation is further complicated by a plague turning people into post-modern lepers, a prodigal uncle double-whammied with plague and drug addiction, a Kabyle grandmother who may be a witch. I loved horror as a kid and still appreciate well-made ones, but Alpha is a mixed Halloween bag (apologies to those who prefer not to think of autumn yet).

The film is essentially melodrama. It partakes of all the conventions: heeby-jeeby horror, violent conflict, sentimentality, physical action, emotionalism, plus those conventions specific to movies: shock imagery and editing, loud music, and hammy acting. What these techniques have in common is effect: they push your buttons. But that goes with a paucity of ideas, insight, thought, while emotion, melodrama’s forte, is overwrought but synthetic.

There are analogies to real life, but these go largely to waste. The plague reminds us of the AIDS epidemic (and when victims wheeze dust of Covid). But there’s zero explanation. Alpha’s mother is a doctor, but we get no discussion of cause, treatment, cures, research, or a possible social dimension. Victims with an advanced stage of the disease look almost aesthetic with marble-like skin, cracks, varicose veins, sort of like Pompeii lava victims. (This must take some doing, so there are more less advanced cases, who look like they’ve had calamine lotion brushed over them.)

Ms. Ducournau seems overly concerned with that aesthetic side, and with references to other films. We’re reminded of ’80s and ’90s movies about AIDS like Philadelphia and Les Nuits Fauves. When victims try to force their way into the hospital, it’s like Walking Dead. In a more general way Ms. Ducournau’s style seems modelled on the over-the-top directors of the 1980s: Jean-Jacques Beineix, Luc Besson, Léos Carax. She has a heavier hand, but what she can do, she does very well. One scene, a long shot of Alpha bleeding in a swimming pool, enclosed within a pink cloud while other students swim the hell away, evokes Carrie, but is extraordinary in its own right.

Alpha’s tattoo is a jagged A, so American viewers may be reminded of good ol’ Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter, forced to wear an A for Adultery (embroidered not tattooed). But there’s only the most basic contextualization: the tattooing happened at a party under a haze of drugs and sex, but where everyone was canoodling in the same way. In any case, the body décor in question is hardly unusual in our time of tattoos, piercings, baroque hair-dying and whatever else. Alpha’s ostracism by her classmates may recall Joseph Losey’s The Boy With Green Hair. There, one could make the association between a boy whose hair turns green and persecuted leftists in McCarthyist America. The only particularity about Alpha is her Kabyle background, but her peers don’t make an issue of this (they all live in a concrete suburb with many minorities).

Alpha may actually be suffering from a psychosomatic ailment, but the director throws in her lot with those genres we’ve become tired of: plague movies, body horror, munching zombies. It’s too bad Ms. Ducournau doesn’t make some much-needed connections: between body horror and how many people are so dematerialized and virtual they’re dissociated from their own bodies; how they have themselves become conformist, ever-snacking zombies; how when a pandemic did happen many just miffed that it put a crimp into their lifestyles.

The tattoo periodically bleeds, freaking Alpha out. No one, not even her doctor mother, remedies this—at least Carrie’s teenage tormenters bombarded her with tampons. Despite that, Mélissa Boros (apparently in her first feature-film role) is as affecting as Sissy Spacek in Carrie. Like that film, Alpha portrays a girl facing the changes wrought by adolescence, in addition to the random horrors of contemporary life.

Lurking inside Alpha is a compelling family drama that needed developing. Aside from Alpha, there’s Amin, her uncle. We don’t get into his early life. He may have been a disappointed soccer player (like the disappointed Little Leaguer in Edward Yang’s Taipei Story). He’s been estranged from his sister, who now overcompensates. Taha Rahim (who recently starred in the biopic Aznavour) is a great actor, a French-Algerian Marlon Brando. His performance leaps at you from the screen, but here he seems like the Brando in his ’60s phase, stranded in bad or oddball movies.

Golshifteh Farahani is powerful as Alpha’s mother, a woman being pulled in several directions. She’s a dedicated doctor caring for plague victims in an overburdened hospital. She has a push-pull relationship with a problem sibling (putting it mildly). She cares for her daughter in a way that borders on invasive, projecting her own childhood traumas. Beyond that, she’s someone with an obsessive need to immerse herself in family, friends, her Kabyle culture. One problem with this is that it’s a bit caricatured. The second lies with Ms. Farahani’s performance. Unlike Rahim, she’s not of North African stock, but is Iranian, not from a working-class, banlieue background but from a distinguished artistic family. When she tries too hard to play a character from a markedly different milieu the result, while impressive, can be self-conscious.

Alpha would have been much more successful if it had focused on the family and its issues. What’s genuinely fascinating about it is how a young girl deals with a karmic catharsis of troubles dating back before her birth. All the rest is sensationalistic distraction. William Blake once said “You never know how much is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” In the case of this film, now we know.

Production: Kallouche Cinéma/Mandarin et Compagnie/Frakas Productions

Distribution: Diaphana