Julia Ducournau’s new feature film “Alpha”: Bloody needles, dangerous virus

The drug addict Amin (Tahar Rahim), who has just come out of prison, was infected by a needle. His sister (Golshifteh Farahani) is a doctor and takes him into her home. He’s supposed to get clean in her daughter Alpha’s (Mélissa Boros) nursery.

A needle also recently penetrated the 13-year-old’s skin: When she was half-drunk at a party, a boy pricked her with the letter A on her left upper arm. The tattoo alarms her mother. She disinfects it, organizes a tetanus booster – and knows that two weeks of uncertainty lie ahead. Only then can alpha be tested.

In her third feature film, the French director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau very clearly evokes the memory of the height of the AIDS crisis, without placing her work precisely in time. The absence of modern technology points to the late eighties or early nineties, but the filmmaker, born in 1983, is not interested in historical analysis, but rather in creating an atmosphere of fear and exclusion.

And she always succeeds in doing this impressively, for example when Alpha is increasingly treated like a leper at school. Once, her classmates attacked her in swimming class. Alpha hits his head and bleeds, whereupon the pool suddenly empties of screaming teenagers. Ducournau stages it with a camera emerging from the water like an explosion.

Rather than an implosion, it shows the fate of a gay English teacher who, in one scene, endures a student’s openly homophobic interpretation of a poem with some composure and then bursts into tears behind his desk on another day. In the class, Alpha alone seems to see and understand him – she once happened to meet him in a waiting room with his half-petrified partner.

Depending on the stage of the disease, the infected move more and more clumsily, but they never resemble those affected by AIDS that we know from films and photos of the epidemic period. In “Alpha”, the sick and especially the dead radiate a very unique, dignified beauty, although the pain of turning into stone is never ignored. The accompanying fading of the skin also seems to have affected the images, which are in desaturated blue-gray tones. The flashbacks, which take place eight years earlier, are characterized by a warm orange-red.

By the standards of Julia Ducournau, who has established herself as a master of body horror with her debut “Raw” and the magnificent Cannes winner “Titane”, “Alpha”, which is designed as a family drama, seems almost understated. Although there are some body close-ups that border on disgust, as well as a sequence reminiscent of zombie films with infected people crowding into a hospital, overall this time she is more interested in the psychology and her characters’ longing for connection.

Infected people crowd outside the hospital like zombies

So Alpha, who grew up without a father, asks her mother after her party escapade whether she still loves her and is told, “I had a long day.” The fact that Alpha becomes her quasi-patient due to her possible infection brings the two closer together – but not in the way Alpha wants.

After initial rejection, she forms a kind of outsider community with Amin, both of them writhing in pain on their mattresses in the children’s room at night. Ducournau then collages the moment of greatest closeness between them from euphoric scenes on a football field and in a bar. It’s wonderfully stirring, you just wish she hadn’t chosen Nick Cave’s “Mercy Seat” as the accompanying music. When he sings “And I’m not afraid to die,” it’s very striking.

Amin’s strong desire to die respects Alpha – unlike her mother, who saves his life several times. As a doctor and as a sister, she can’t help it. But ultimately there is also a selfish ruthlessness in this. Or as Amin puts it: “Too much love sometimes makes people go crazy.”