For a time, Julia Ducournau was known as the rising French queen of body horror. Her debut was the cannibalism-as-sexual-appetite allegory Raw, while her follow-up Titane, was a meditation on serial killing and family loneliness in which a woman has sex with a car. So, when Ducournau returned to the Cannes competition line-up this year with Alpha, four years after winning the Palme d’Or for Titane, critics were primed for yet another gory genre fable. Instead, they witnessed an emotional monument to the experience of loving someone in a dying, socially outcast body. Tahar Rahim, one of the film’s stars, sensed a difference on the page. “I felt this emotional aspect that was new to her cinema,” he tells me.
Describing Alpha is a slippery task – attending to the storylines is less important than surrendering to its mysterious rhythms and primal emotions. Set across two timelines within the bosom of a French-Berber family, it depicts the rupturing relationship between a mother (Golshifteh Farahani) and her adolescent daughter Alpha (Mélissa Boros) amid the reappearance of Uncle Amin (Rahim), an addict with a virus that is killing him. The unnamed virus is coded – by the Eighties and Nineties settings of the film – as Aids, though the sweep is open enough for viewers to read it as they will. Alpha spun me back into the feeling of caring for my mum as she was dying of brain cancer, and however frightening the deterioration of her body was, our love was still more powerful.
