Golshifteh Farahani and Mélissa Boros in director Julia Ducournau's 'Alpha.'Elevation/Supplied
Alpha
Written and directed by Julia Ducournau
Starring Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani and Melissa Boros
Classification PG; 128 minutes
Opens in select theatres March 27
Critic’s Pick
“Into the mercy seat, I climb. My head is shaved, my head is wired. And like a moth that tries to enter the bright eye, I go shuffling out of life, just to hide in death awhile. And anyway, I never lied.” The haunting words of songwriter Nick Cave, from his apocalyptic 1988 track The Mercy Seat echo throughout a key scene in the new French film Alpha, the death-defying lyrics repeating with increased intensity, nearly spiralling out of control, as the film’s world, too, threatens to do the same.
A nervy, eye-popping reimagining of the AIDS crisis as filtered through the lens of a frenzied domestic drama, Julia Ducournau’s new film is, like the very best Cave song, a profoundly upsetting creation to sink into, equal parts blood-pumping passion and skin-crawling menace. And just as The Mercy Seat relies on a listener’s endurance − its chorus, with a modicum of alterations, is uttered 15 times over the seven-minute-plus song − so, too, does Alpha require a certain kind of extreme commitment. Or maybe it is a commitment to the extreme?
Set in an alternate-universe version of coastal France, Alpha imagines a world in which the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s has been recontextualized as a mysterious blood-borne illness that calcifies its victims’ bodies into marble-like structures. Chip away at their stone flesh long enough, and the ill crumble into nothingness.
The love and fury of Alpha’s Julia Ducournau, the omega of France’s extreme-cinema wave
Against this epidemic, a troubled 13-year-old girl named Alpha (Melissa Boros) decides one night to receive a homemade tattoo while drunkenly attending a raucous house party. The amateur, unsanitized needlework − which is depicted in up-close detail, so graphic that audiences who freaked out over that John Travolta/Uma Thurman scene in Pulp Fiction might want to run and hide now − brands Alpha as a potential carrier of the unnamed disease, and sends the teen’s physician mother (Golshifteh Farahani) into a spiral of anxiety.
If that tension wasn’t enough to tear the family apart, Alpha must also reckon with the return of her uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim), a heroin addict whose life may also become defined by the disease. And then there is the red mist that appears to be gradually engulfing Alpha’s entire town.
A movie of overwhelming doom and fierce hope, Ducournau’s third feature is as outrageous as her cannibalism drama Raw and guffaw-inducing thriller Titane, but with a kind of narrative and aesthetic abandon that few working filmmakers today seem able to embrace.
The film’s chronology is split between two time periods that bleed together, initially requiring audiences to possess a keen eye and ear for script continuity. Meanwhile, the marble-ization of the afflicted bodies might strike some as confounding, if not visually vulgar, and others as a beautifully blunt metaphor for AIDS, an illness that, as Susan Sontag once wrote, is “the most meaning-laden of diseases.”
Ducournau’s third feature has a kind of narrative and aesthetic abandon that few working filmmakers today seem able to embrace.Elevation/Supplied
But ultimately, this is a movie that rewards total submission. Don’t try to understand it − just sink into it.
Ducournau’s cast certainly embrace this approach, with each of the three main players delivering wildly alive performances, the kind of work that makes you fear for their lives immediately following production, including the young Boros, who is asked to go to places hopefully unfamiliar to even the most troubled teenager.
Rahim, in particular, goes so deep and beyond expectations as the lost, wounded, but never pitiful Amin that you can practically hear Ducournau gasping on the other side of the camera. After breaking out a decade and a half ago with Jacques Audiard’s jailhouse epic A Prophet, Rahim has oscillated uneasily between prestige French cinema (Monsieur Aznavour) and Hollywood misadventures (Madame Web). Here, though, Rahim latches onto the role of a lifetime with purpose and conviction.
By the time the film reaches that Nick Cave-soundtracked sequence − a moment of time-warping madness that also embraces and rewires the stylistic legacies of two other big Ducournau influences, David Cronenberg and Clive Barker − Alpha will have either strapped you into the mercy seat, ready to face your final days, or left you itching to escape. Either way, you’ll feel more alive than you have in ages.