ALPHA: 1 ½ STARS. “prioritizes provocation over coherent storytelling.”
SYNOPSIS: In “Alpha,” a new French-language body horror/pandemic film now playing in theatres, a teenager’s tattoo may have exposed her to a deadly disease.
CAST: Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani, Mélissa Boros, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield, Louai El Amrousy. Written and directed by Julia Ducournau.
REVIEW: “Titane” director Julia Ducournau plumbs the depths of tedium to tell an opaque story that doesn’t have the narrative urgency to overcome its emotional inertness.
Set in both the past and present in coastal France as a contagious blood-borne disease turns people into something resembling marble statues, the story centers on the fourteen-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros), her physician mother (Golshifteh Farahani) and Amin (Tahar Rahim), Alpha’s junkie uncle.
When Alpha arrives home with an infected “A” tattooed on her arm, her mother thinks she may have contracted the mysterious disease. At school the bleeding “A” gets Alpha bullied, while at home she is now forced to share a room with Amin whose intravenous heroin use may have infected him with the strange illness.
Locked in the room while Alpha’s mother is at work, the rebellious teenager and her uncle sneak out on an adventure that may change both their lives.
An unfocussed allegorical take on an AIDS-like epidemic, “Alpha’s” story is told with a broken narrative structure that jumps through time, a confusing device that becomes distracting and disorienting as the film’s runtime goes on.
The filmmaking is demanding, if uneven, the performances committed, but the unconventional storytelling muddies the waters, allowing the themes of family trauma, disease and caregiving to drown in a sea of style and ever-shifting timelines.
“Alpha” is a frustrating movie. An ambitious, timely story of the effects of a society torn apart by an epidemic is done in by an indulgent, heavy hand that prioritizes polarization and provocation over coherent storytelling.
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