“Rahim’s magnificent work is wasted on a film that is an incongruent, surface-level concept that should never have made it out of that stage.”

Julia Ducournau is definitely not out of ideas. But watching her third effort Alpha, the follow-up to her Palme d’Or winning metallic madness Titane, it is becoming increasingly clear that she has problems developing those ideas from the conceptual phase into a cohesive narrative. While still adept at creating powerful, gripping imagery, none of that is in service of a good, or even comprehensible story. Alpha, a clear allegory for the 1980s AIDS crisis, is little more than a family drama that, stripped from a mysterious, transmissible disease and all the paranoia that comes with it (as we experienced in the not so distant past), would be an unremarkable social realist film that Cannes has plenty of. Lacking any poignancy about this health crisis that it so desperately tries to push to the forefront, Alpha devolves into a disjointed, incongruent mess in which very little is left standing except for a single performance.

Alpha (Mélissa Boros) finds herself at a party that should have an age limit clearly above her 13 years, getting a tattoo with a needle that may or may not have been used before. This is irresponsible in the best of times, but those are not the times Alpha lives in. There is a disease that has the population in its grip, transmissible by blood (and possibly air, but like so many things in Alpha this remains unclear), which over time turns those infected into marble, and obviously very dead, statues. Once her unnamed mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor in a hospital where most of the staff has bailed, finds out what her daughter has been up to, she is understandably very worried that her daughter might turn into stone as well. She has Alpha tested, but while awaiting the test results Alpha is bullied at school (a first sign that logic is not what we should expect; why would schools go on as if nothing’s happening when the health sector seems to be all but collapsed?), except for Adrien, a boy her age for whom she is basically a side piece.

To make things worse, her mother’s brother Amin (Tahar Rahim, severely emaciated for the role) shows up. A junkie who, as later revealed, has been suffering from the disease for quite some time, Amin builds up a bond with his young niece as his health severely deteriorates without a fix to let him sink into a haze. He is not the most responsible uncle though, at one point taking her on a nighttime bender past seedy underground clubs and even seedier brothels.

It is at this point that Alpha really loses the plot. As the film skips back and forth between two time periods eight years apart, the separation of the two made possible for the viewer by Farahani’s coiffe changing from a perm to straight and back, in the final stretch it starts to blend the two so that hair alone isn’t enough to figure out what point in time we are looking at. Is this a bout of magical realism? A hackneyed attempt at symbolism? Or simply Ducournau throwing her hands up and just going for broke. Smart money says it’s the latter, as none of what came before suggests the director really knew where she was going with this story. That leads to plot strands left dangling (Alpha’s teacher, whose boyfriend is halfway to turning into Michelangelo’s David, so to speak, is a prime example of this), panic attacks for the protagonist that have little effect on the girl’s arc, and a brother-sister relationship made so important that the young girl at the heart of the story is left with a limp attempt at sex with the not-quite boyfriend just to give her something to do. This Alpha clearly has no Omega.

The film clearly is intended to take us back 40-odd years, when the world was held in the grip of AIDS and the fear and paranoia surrounding it. The gay teacher with an infected boyfriend, the drug addicts being victims of this debilitating disease: the parallels are clear. Ducournau doesn’t really have anything deeper to say about it though, using the disease as a plot device, and using it irregularly. The pandemic seems to have been raging for eight years, yet there is no apparent cure. If we learned anything from COVID, it is that a vaccine doesn’t take that long if the world really pulls together. Charlie Polinger’s The Plague, an adolescent-aimed drama that also had young kids feeling paranoid about a friend possibly transmitting a disease to them, said more about bullying and human behavior when fearful than Alpha ever does. Even a film like Diego Céspedes’ The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, a quasi Western explicitly about the AIDS crisis and how it affects the inhabitants of a remote Chilean mining town, has more humanity in it than Ducournau’s latest effort. The French director comes up empty trying to make any comment about the human condition in the face of such a crisis, apart from platitudes – far more interested as she is in the dynamic between Farahani and her drug-addled brother. Removed from all the hoopla Alpha would have been a much stronger, but also smaller film, yet Ducournau seems to have started with the concept of a disease turning people into statues, but didn’t know how to elicit drama from that, therefore injecting the film with the more easily recognizable and accessible human drama involving Farahani and Rahim. The former is given the short end of the stick, also having to keep the incomprehensible story around the disease afloat, while Rahim gets far more opportunity to shine. His performance, perhaps the film’s only saving grace, is a very technical exercise, but even through all the tics and shakes the actor manages to create a true warmth and humanity in his character. Rahim’s magnificent work though is wasted on a film that is an incongruent, surface-level concept that should never have made it out of that stage.