US Edition‘Alpha’ Review: A Potentially Infected Tattoo Sparks a Tortured AIDS Allegory in Julia Ducournau’s Rotten Follow-up to ‘Titane’
- Julia Ducournau's film Alpha, a body-horror sci-fi about a 13-year-old girl with a mysterious tattoo, premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.
- The film draws from Ducournau's experience growing up during the AIDS epidemic and revisits trauma using an allegorical illness that turns bodies to stone.
- Alpha follows the protagonist's mother, a doctor, who fears infection after the girl gets a homemade tattoo, as her family faces fear, stigma, and isolation in the late 1990s.
- The disease causes victims to cough chalky powder and slowly fossilize, and the film features striking visuals and intense emotional scenes, including a brutal attack on Alpha.
- Alpha delves into the damaging effects of fear and stigma, delivering a poignant and tragic narrative that deepens Ducournau’s thematic exploration; the film is scheduled to debut in U.S. Cinemas this autumn through Neon.
35 Articles
35 Articles
Julia Ducournau, Film Director, at the Cannes Film Festival: "...Alpha Is Revisiting the First Time I Felt Fear in My Stomach"
By imagining sick people who mutate into marble statues, the director and screenwriter goes back to violence against people living with the AIDS virus in the 1980s and 1990s. In an interview with the World, she evokes the filming of her film, notably the choice of the young actress, Mélissa Boros.
Cannes 2025: "Alpha" by Julia Ducurno, a Bodi-Horror About the Trauma of Growing up. In Her Last Movie, a Heroine Had Sex with Cars, Into a New Virus, Turning People Into Stone.
At the Cannes Festival, "Alfu" was shown, a new film by Julia Ducourno. In 2021, she introduced the "Titan" bodi-horror, where the heroine had sex with cars, and won the "Golden Palm branch" as the first woman in the twenty-first century and the second in history to receive the award. In "Alfa", Dukurno again works with the "inanimate-inanimate" opposition: because of illness, people become marbles. Anton Dolin explains why it is an unforgettabl…
'Alpha' Review: Julia Ducournau’s Mournful Horror Drama Cuts Through Body and Soul
The term “body horror” is one that carries with it a lot of expectations. If you were to hear it at last year’s Cannes, it would have likely been used in reference to the breakout hit “The Substance,” with its gallons of bloody viscera being splashed all over the screen. But there are also the works of body horror that rely less on external spectacle. Take Julia Ducournau’s quietly flooring “Alpha,” the knockout follow-up to her Palme d’Or-winni…
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