Emotions are way more complex then we give them credit for…

Auteur Julia Ducorneau with her new film Alpha trades in the shock and awe of the body horror that brought her to the limelight for some more emotional horror about the inevitable failure of our bodies.

Alpha (Melissa Boros), a troubled 13-year-old lives with her single mom. Their world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm from a questionable source.

Full disclosure, Alpha is more pretentious French abstract style cinema then many audiences will expect, but that being said if pretentious French abstract style cinema is your jam, Alpha just might be right up your alley.

In this film, Ducorneau crafts a grim allegorical tale of a near future dystopia that alludes to mysterious disease that is killing the population, flashing us images of the AIDS epidemic all the way to COVID and the opioid crisis.  It’s less about the weird and more about trying to let a little bit of hope elevate above the grime that seemingly permeates our day to day lives.

Obviously Ducorneau crafts a stunning visual tableau but for the first time it’s actually leaning much harder on its leading actors to give us a perspective of what is going on in this universe, even as we are jumping along in time and perspective throughout the narrative.  It’s messy but there’s a really interesting lyrical nature to the story that she’s trying to tell.  Nothing is easy and it’s occasionally maddening but it’s always impactful.

In only her second feature, young Melissa Boros is simply wonderful as she captures the chaos of puberty and youth during a very uncertain time.  Golshifteh Farahani is an absolute rock and the anchor of the film as she navigates the uncertainty in front of her trying to keep her family alive and do her job in a hospital system that is falling apart due to mismanagement and the pure chaos of being overwhelmed by pandemic (that while never named is represented visually In a pretty cool way).  Tahar Rahim is in the middle of the two as the chaos threatening to bring them down into the chaos but also the one genuine source of empathy and understanding of the chaos of youth being lived by young Alpha.

With its narrative complexities and it’s weaving back and forth from reality to a dream state of emotion; Alpha is far from a perfect movie and isn’t the body horror movie people might be looking for you, but in this modern state of emotional instability that the world finds itself in Alpha reminds us of something very important that can often be easy to forget.

If we’re not careful, the perception and the fear of the events going on around us can become reality and that more often than not, we need to take a breath and remind ourselves to be kinder about the things we ultimately can’t control….even though we’d really like to.