With her first two feature films, 2016’s subversive cannibal chiller Raw and 2021 object sexuality body horror Titane, French director Julia Ducournau announced herself as one of the boldest genre filmmakers working today. And if the first trailer for Alpha — Ducournau’s latest mononymously titled movie — is anything to go by, then that status isn’t about to change anytime soon. A coming-of-age tale with a now-trademark Ducournau body horror twist, Alpha follows a teenage girl (Mélissa Boros) who gets a dodgy tattoo and consequently finds herself afflicted with a new disease that’s turning people to marble, much to the horror of her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani). Sound wild? Well it looks it, too — just check out the trailer:
Hoo boy — well that was intense! Rounding out what you could reasonably call Ducournau’s ‘Transformation Trilogy’, it looks like Alpha is dialling down the horror a little and dialling up the human drama a lot, keying into the mother-daughter relationship between Boros’s titular teen and Farahani while exploring what appears to be a fairly direct Aids allegory. But if this trailer teases a more intimate, emotional piece than Ducournau’s more outré genre-driven past works, the body horror elements — a fixation on flesh and blood and the mutation of the female body — still remain present and correct, promising we’ll likely find ourselves squirming as well as crying in our seats before the credits roll. There’s also the presence of Tahar Rahim’s (Madame Web) Amin — a drug addict suffering with the marbleising condition who’ has an as-yet-unexplained connection’s somehow to Alpha and her mother — to mull over, too. Hmm…
Having made waves when it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, the discourse already promises to be strong with this one — and honestly, anything less from a Julia Ducournau joint would be a major disappointment. We look forward to finding out whether Alpha is destined to dominate our movies of the year list when it hits UK cinemas on 14 November.
