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Cannes 2025 – Alpha: tears and marble [critique]
After the Palme d’Or for Titanium, the French filmmaker returns to Cannes with a film on a strange disease that transforms bodies into marble. A delicate horror body as amazing as it is moving.
After having a human flesh eaten up to a veterinary student and after having shown a serial killer mating in a car, Julia Ducournau would attack with Alpha to a metaphor for AIDS. This was what we heard on the steps of the Palais des Festivals, but in reality, his third feature film is more than that, or something else; A work especially less provocative and less frontal than its first two long.
The starting postulate is simple and dazzling: in the 80s or 90s, a disease gradually transformed bodies into marble statues. The teenager Alpha (Mélissa Boros, fire of fire) sees her uncle toxicomina amin (Tahar Rahim, flayed, masterful), fairly in bad shape. His mother doctor (Golshifteh Farahani) tries to save the sick while the population prefers to forget them …
From these premises of series B, almost Cronenbergian, Ducournau draws his film towards an unexpected depth and emotion. The marbled bodies it films – white as snow, or black as jet – become living monuments. A denial scene thus shows Amin, lying in bed, skin cracked like a thirsty land, while his niece traces constellations between his blood spots. “It’s prettier like that,” she said, summarizing Ducournau’s very gesture: transfiguring the horror in beauty.
At the end of the screening, we heard the journalists whispering “COVVI”, “AIDS”. Yet, Alpha Avoids all the cinema traps with message. Instead of a discourse on stigma, Ducournau offers a night and hallucinated trip between uncle and niece, bathed in electric blue light. Instead of a lesson on tolerance, she films a deaf violence pool scene, where panic in the face of contamination turns into pure brutality.
Film Concept then? Where the eras would mix, where dreams would gradually gnaw the real and where the living merges with the specters … Alpha is first of all a love story – multiple, complex, without pathos. The desperate love of a doctor’s sister for her brother Junkie. The emerging love of a teenager for an uncle whom she gets to know, to accept. The furtive love of a professor (Finnegan Oldfield) for his already status lover. The filmmaker also films these sick bodies with incredible tenderness, even in their degradation. As in this sequence where Alpha’s mother takes particles from the marbled back of her brother, as we would caress a sculpture to feel the roughness. This desperate gesture of love condenses all the ambivalence of the film. But Alphait is also (especially?) A history of ghosts. Those who poison us, those who make us grow, those we have tied up and who reappear …
By abandoning the shock strings, Ducournau therefore widens deeper in our collective fears and affects sometimes mind -blowing emotional points. Film on the fear of losing those we love, on the bodies that betray us, on the guilty silences and the traumas that we transmit (like diseases), His film therefore resonates far beyond its 80s anchoring and diseases of the time. After the cannibal ferocity of Grave or mechanical, disorder and transgender madness of Titaniumthis film as petrified as alive marks in any case the advent of a mastering filmmaker.
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