Julia Ducournau’s Indulgent AIDS-Era Genre Bender

Four years ago, French writer-director Julia Ducournau came to Cannes with her sophomore feature, Titane, a movie that both shocked and dazzled audiences, then shocked a few more people by walking away with the Palme d’Or. It was only the second time a woman won the festival’s top prize, after Jane Campion did so 30 years earlier. And it was certainly the first time that a film featuring a girl getting busy with a Cadillac, which winds up impregnating her, ever accomplished such a feat.

Titane kicked off with orgasmic automobile intercourse and only got crazier from there, if such a thing is possible. It felt like three or four movies at once, all told simultaneously and as loudly as possible. And while Ducournau’s excellent coming-of-age debut, Raw, was at once half-crazy and half-contained, Titane was like a set by a DJ doing everything she can to hold down the dance floor, raising the volume to the max at all times, switching up records midway through each song to keep folks on their feet.

The director applies that same approach to Alpha, a numblingly over-the-top AIDS-era parable that dishes out tons of fresh ideas, serving them with ample gore, VFX, pounding musical interludes and acting that’s turned up several notches. It can impress with its utter originality and technical know-how, but there’s so much going on for so long that many viewers will be exhausted by the midway point, if not earlier. You’ve got to give Ducournau credit for refusing to settle down or take the Hollywood route after winning the Palme, but you also have to wonder if her latest feature will please anyone but her.

Which isn’t to say that Alpha doesn’t try to tackle a whole bunch of serious themes many of us can relate to. But again, there are too many themes crammed together into one giant metaphorical sandwich — albeit a sandwich that’s served on a tasty French baguette — to the point that the flavors all cancel each other out.

First and foremost, the movie is a period piece revisiting the horrors of the AIDS epidemic with actual horror, transforming HIV-positive patients into humans whose bodies gradually turn to marble, like X-Men crossed with the Greek antiquities wing at the Louvre. It’s a powerful visual idea, taking the famous images of sores plaguing AIDS sufferers in the ’80s and transforming them into hauntingly beautiful works of body horror. But it’s also so overcooked that it seems kind of silly: Why not just show the real thing, which is more horrible than anything the special makeup effects department could come up with? (Though credit goes to makeup artist Olivier Afonso for making the marble look great.)    

Second, or perhaps first as well — there are only firsts in Ducournau’s films, all of them screaming for attention — the film is a coming-of-age story about a 13-year-old girl, Alpha (the arresting Mélissa Boros), who gets a tattoo with a dirty needle in the opening scene and therefore may have contracted the deadly disease herself. We spend much of the story wondering if she’s sick or not, leading to numerous instances of Alpha bleeding out of different wounds and scaring everyone around her. Highlights include two standout school sequences: one involving a bloody volleyball game, the other a swimming class in which Alpha bumps her head badly and clears the water like the shark in Jaws.

And finally, Alpha is a tragic family story about drug addiction and loss. The girl’s hardworking mom (Golshifteh Farahani) is a doctor both publicly, in a dingy hospital ridden with marbleized patients, and privately to her brother, Amin (Tahar Rahim), a cadaverous junkie who shows up on their doorstep jonesing for another fix. He winds up never quite leaving, oscillating between friendly respites in which he plays the fun uncle to Alpha and scenes in which he nearly overdoses and has to be resurrected with adrenaline by his sister. Between all the shooting up, blood tests and other injections, there are more syringes on display here than in Panic in Needle Park.

Medical queasiness and gory bodily intrusions have been a specialty of Ducournau (both of whose parents are doctors) since Raw, which turned a veterinary school into a feeding ground for two cannibal sisters. In Alpha, she combines the trauma of Amin’s habit, which may or may not have given him the marble disease, with the fear and suffering experienced by kids growing up when AIDS came into existence. (It’s worth noting that in France, it took several years for the government to officially recognize the epidemic.)

These are worthy ideas, but there are so many of them that we begin to lose count. At some point we realize that the skeletal Amin may be a product of the hallucinations (a scaffolding tearing apart in the wind, a ceiling crashing down on a bedroom) that Alpha has been experiencing since the start of the film. Without warning we’re jumping between past and deeper past, between hairstyles from the 1980s and 70s, as if Alpha also needed a time-hopping scenario added to everything else it’s already tossed at us.

Ducournau is definitely talented when it comes to craft and execution, jarring us with hyper-realistic horror that’s equal parts Cronenberg, Carpenter and Gaspar Noé. But she doesn’t know when to stop or just sit down for a moment and let the viewer breathe. Too much of a good thing, whether it’s marbleized body parts or blood dripping onto an overhead projector in a classroom, can become a bad thing when we have no time to take it all in.   

She deserves credit, though, for thinking outside the box and having the skill to visualize such thoughts. Teaming up for the third time with Belgian cinematographer Ruben Impens, the director creates startling images from the very first shot, when the opening title transforms into a needle wound, to the last, when Alpha emerges in a stirring urban dust storm. Production designer Emmanuelle Duplay (Emilia Perez) gives all the interiors, whether bedrooms or hospital wards, an eerie claustrophobic feel, while costume designer Isabelle Pannetier recreates the carefree, punkish looks of the epoch.

Of the three leads, Rahim is the most unrecognizable, having gone full Jared Leto-in-Dallas Buyers Club to portray a druggie at the very end of his tether. He hardly needs makeup to look terrifying, though his warmth comes across as well whenever Amin puts on a smile. The always good Farahani has a lot of screaming and shouting to do, pulling it off convincingly but then overdoing it in too many scenes of the same thing.

And finally, newcomer Boros impresses as a combative young woman who gets repeatedly put through the wringer, barely coming out of the movie unscathed. She joins two other actresses — Garance Marillier in Raw and Agathe Rousselle in Titane — whom Ducournau brought to light, slathered in blood and then transformed into the unlikely heroines of her freaky cinematic universe, which grows more outlandish with each new work.