For a certain type of adventurous filmgoer, Julia Ducournau is a household name. Her first feature, Raw (2016), was part of a nascent wave of female-focused body horror, using cannibalism as a metaphor for burgeoning sexuality and the pains of growing up. Her second film, Titane (2021), was one of the wildest Palme d’Or winners in Cannes history, taking the top prize at the world’s most prestigious film festival with a story about a woman who becomes pregnant with a human-machine hybrid after a passionate encounter with a sentient car.
Ducournau’s latest, Alpha, also premiered at Cannes, where it baffled reviewers who expected another of the shocking, squirming body-horror movies that have become the director’s signature. Alpha is set in the ‘90s, and uses an imaginary disease that causes humans to slowly turn into stone as a metaphor for the paranoia and misinformation that were prevalent in the darkest days of the AIDS pandemic.
