20/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: Titane’s Julia Ducournau returns with an exhausting, weird AIDS parable that’s somehow not weird enough

It was never going to be easy to follow Titane [+see also:
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film profile], a fun, sexy shocker of a film that earned Julia Ducournau the Palme d’Or back in 2021. To some, the win was branded as “controversial” – and was marred by Spike Lee’s hilarious snafu during the ceremony – but Titane really was one of the most-dissected titles that year, full of energy and chutzpah. This energy is now gone.

Alpha, marking Ducournau’s return to the main competition at Cannes, is a head-splitting mess – and one that’s full of unexplainable choices. Young Mélissa Boros struggles as its teenage lead, and the musical choices deafen. Grief, guilt and virus outbreak battle for attention in a plot that keeps stumbling over its own feet. It’s still weird, which is its saving grace, another one being Tahar Rahim’s performance as the girl’s junkie uncle, Amin. He’s as committed here as Christian Bale in The Machinist [+see also:
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Before he makes an appearance, Alpha (Boros) lives with her doctor mother (Golshifteh Farahani), and while barely 13, she’s already partying hard: one night, after she finally sobers up, they discover a clunky tattoo on her arm. Her mother is terrified, as she thinks Alpha might have “gotten it” – a virus nobody wants to talk about, but everyone fears.

Ducournau is trying something else here, something slower and perhaps more intimate. She doesn’t suddenly swerve all the way into social drama, thank the dark Lord: the eccentricity and the body horror are still ingrained in her worlds. The murderous virus – which echoes the HIV/AIDS outbreak with Farahani’s constant whispers about “dirty needles” – turns people into marble statues, and that’s an intriguing image: the entirety of society is literally collapsing like a chipped wall. Whenever that’s in focus, Alpha picks up some pace. But Ducournau can’t help but return to her young protagonist, and to this troubled family, and so a new game of repetition begins.

There’s a lot of waiting here for something to happen and finally put these self-devouring elements in their place, but the outcome is unsatisfying – this entire film is, at one point, covered in orange dust like it’s Blade Runner 2049 [+see also:
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film profile] all over again. After Titane, Ducournau could probably have done whatever she wanted, or she could also have done more of the same – instead, she decided to experiment. She still stands by the outcasts and rejects, ostracised because of their background, addiction or sexuality – like this bespectacled girl, starting to like a boy, the sad-eyed Amin, or Alpha’s teacher, played by Finnegan Oldfield and hired to quote Edgar Allan Poe and weep. And yet this “dream within a dream” is simply exhausting. It’s a pity to see such a gifted genre director, capable of delivering true shocks and surprises, drown in arthouse-y pretension that has already been plaguing this competition since the start of the festival.

Alpha was produced by France’s Mandarin et Cie and Kallouche Cinema, and Belgium’s Frakas Productions. Its international sales are handled by Charades.