Julia Ducournau attends the jury press conference at the 76th annual Cannes film festival in May, 2023.Mike Coppola/Getty Images
Julia Ducournau knows that turning heads is easy – it’s keeping them from swivelling clean off that’s the tricky part. Across just three features, the 42-year-old French filmmaker has become one of global cinema’s most polarizing voices. You either fall in love with her deliberately outre confections – the 2016 coming-of-age via cannibalism thriller Raw, the 2021 auto-erotic (as in literal sex with cars) drama Titane – or you are so repelled by her vision that the only reaction possible is a purely physical one.
In fact, during the Toronto International Film festival premiere of Raw almost a decade ago, two moviegoers fainted mid-screening. And when Ducournau debuted her third film, Alpha, at the Cannes Film Festival last spring, an audience member in the balcony of the Palais Theatre endured a medical emergency, which nearly derailed the evening (it was never confirmed whether the incident was related to the content). It all, in the end, turned out fine – including Ducournau’s reputation for pushing boundaries.
A propulsive and unnerving examination of loss and addiction, Alpha is set in an alternate universe in which an unnamed blood-borne disease, explicitly coded as a stand-in for AIDS, calcifies victims’ bodies into a marble-like substance before crumbling them completely. As paranoia and panic rule the streets, the drama follows three characters in various states of distress: heroin addict Amin (Tahar Rahim), his physician sister (Golshifteh Farahani) and her 14-year-old daughter of the title (Mélissa Boros), who might have become infected after receiving a tattoo at a drunken house party. With sequences recalling the work of Clive Barker filtered through the dark but romantic rhythms of a Nick Cave song, Alpha is a movie designed to leave you exhausted and emotionally stripped down.
Julia Ducournau’s blood-rushing drama Alpha will leave you feeling more alive
Which is just about how Ducournau felt that night in Cannes, where she was greeted with a rapturous standing ovation inside the Palais, but divisive reviews outside. And it was those reactions – with some critics calling the film maddening and impenetrable, but others, including myself, praising its full-throated intensity – that quashed any hopes the film would follow in Titane’s footsteps and win the French festival’s coveted Palme d’Or prize. But for Ducournau, the Cannes premiere felt completely in line with the journey of the film itself.
“To me the film is a lot about forgiveness, and the day before we started shooting, and one way or another, everyone involved projected their own past and their own family history of loss and grief into the production,” the director recalls today, a few weeks out from Alpha’s North American release. “That premiere was so emotional because a lot of the crew were there, the actors, being naked in front of everybody. That’s where we put our heart, in front of you. There was a lot of pride and fear and love that night.”
Mélissa Boros in Julia Ducournau's polarizing thriller 'Alpha.'Elevation/Supplied
Love and fear seem to be Ducournau’s core operating emotions. When filming Titane, which garnered easy headlines for its centrepiece sequence in which a young woman gets impregnated by an automobile (yes, the director is a fan of David Cronenberg, why do you ask?), Ducournau said that she made the production in a state of anger. It was a fury of female anguish, misogyny, trauma – white-hot rage that burst forth in sometimes bloody, sometimes confounding scenes. Yet Alpha was baked in a more compassionate headspace.
“There is anger, yes, but the main thing is love. From the beginning, I wanted to convey this idea of conditional and unconditional love, and to dig deep into that. That is what is able to keep us standing. More than ever, expressing love without fear or sounding cheesy or cliché has become a moral duty nowadays,” she says. “Love is the last thing that can keep us standing. This feeling of a deep faith in humanity, as a way of resisting this incredibly overwhelming hate wave that we’re going through right now.”
To reflect and counteract this contemporary moment of hate and fear, though, Ducournau found herself going back in time, specifically to her own memories of growing up during the heights of the AIDS crisis, when she watched so many become ostracized.
“It’s that fear of the otherness. Not only does it feel as if we never take the lessons of the past, but that we do not seem, as a society, to give space for acceptance and acknowledgment and reparations for things that have happened,” she says. “The way that HIV patients were treated in the eighties and nineties, was about our shared humanity, and it has never been repaired. That leaves a big trace of anger behind. For me, it was sharing this unconditional love and care for people who needed it. But at the same time, it’s an angry scream at that moment.”
'Alpha' is set in an alternate universe in which an unnamed blood-borne disease, explicitly coded as a stand-in for AIDS, calcifies victims’ bodies before crumbling them completely.Elevation/Supplied
While Alpha was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, during which a different kind of societal fear spread, Ducournau is less certain of how much that public-health moment shaped this film’s world.
“I can’t say it’s a total coincidence that I’m making a movie about a pandemic. I started writing this in 2022. But COVID was not as directly in my mind as was AIDS in the nineties,” she says. “The blame, the shame, that happened back then was not exactly in the same place with the COVID crisis. That pandemic, being a huge global trauma, did not stigmatize a very specific fringe of the population because of their lifestyles. What I wanted to go through in this film was how people are stigmatized for who they are, how they live their life and why it’s out of ignorance on the part of the entire society. That feeling of shame. I don’t believe that happened with COVID.”
While some reviews have questioned the film’s allegorical approach for the disease at the centre of its story – “I don’t know if we need a cool aesthetic stand-in for AIDS,” an IndieWire critic mused after the Cannes premiere – Ducournau’s sincere intentions feel more aligned with an oft-quoted Susan Sontag line: “AIDS has turned out, not surprisingly, to be one of the most meaning-laden of diseases.”
“I read her work while writing Alpha, and that’s a beautiful quote that’s very, very painful,” the director says. “The choice of marble was obvious to me from the get-go, because it elevates it. Marble is a material that is dedicated to saints, it’s something that gives a verticality to the person who is portrayed. It puts them above us, and to me, it was clear that we had to find a form of reparation, of newfound respect, to elevate the lives of the people who had been deemed lesser than by an entire world. I wanted to elevate them to the status of saints and heroes.”
Alpha opens in select theatres March 27.