Alpha (15)

(Subtitled)

After her visceral and tender second feature, Titane, Julia Ducournau shifts gears with a unique drama inspired by the AIDS crisis.

Mélissa Boros is Alpha. A little spiky, a little rebellious, we first properly meet her at a teen house party, drunk and unconscious, with someone tattooing a bold, bloody “A” onto her arm. It’s an opening that channels Ducournau’s signature talent for crafting corporeal queasiness, all close-up shots of metal piercing skin that will make even the most inked individual wince. In school, rumours swirl that Alpha has contracted a virus and she is bullied accordingly, but her fierce defence mechanisms can only hold out for so long.

The most remarkable thing here is how those with the fatal illness that Alpha is thought to have contracted, slowly morph into marble statues, as their symptoms progress, an elegant device for expressing how those who leave us become frozen in time before crumbling to dust.

Alpha is an inherently vulnerable film, yet it is just as thorny as her previous two features, but there’s also something lonely and longing here too