This bizarre horror on an epidemic similar to an AIDS is a “ disorienting and crazy whirlwind ”

After winning the Palme d’Or for the shocking titanium, the French director Julia Ducournau is back in Cannes with another nightly bizarre film – but it is an unsatisfactory watch.

One of the most anticipated titles of the Cannes festival this year was Alpha, written and directed by Julia Ducournau. Her latest film, The Magnificly Bonkers Titanium, won the Palme d’Or in 2021, so the news that she returned to Cannes with another sparkling cocktail of body horror and traumatic family relationships had excited the festival -goers – so nervous – to see what a nightmare bizarre Ducournau had in store.

It turns out that there are many nightmare quirks. A disorienting and exasperating whirlwind of haunting sites, thunderous music and fiercely intense performance, Alpha confirms that Ducournau is a visionary artist. But once you have recovered the experience of denigration of the brain to watch its latest film, it seems that it seems much less satisfactory and stimulating than titanium.

Alpha draws his title from her heroine (Mélissa Boros), a 13 -year -old girl who lives in an anonymous French city with her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani). She is not particularly rebellious, but one night, she returns to the house of a party with a large letter of uppercase a sculpted in her arm by a needle the size of a baguette. His mother, a doctor, is naturally upset, especially since amateur tattooing could have given Alpha a mysterious virus that transforms people into stone. As the months go by, the plots of their skin harden, they counsel clouds of dust, and finally they atrophy in corpses in polished white, cracked and creamy white marble. It is a frightening, but also strangely beautiful death: in fact, the deceased are transformed into their own sparkling commemorative statues and worthy of the cathedral.

While the doctor diligently takes care of patients with this virus in his scary hospital, alpha tattooing will not stop spilling blood, an embarrassing affliction that encourages his classmates to avoid it. (This is presented as a despicable example of prejudice, but, really, do children have no point?) But the doctor not only has his daughter and patients to worry. A person who definitely has the virus is his distant brother Amin (Tahar Rahim), a playful and charismatic drug addict.

Some scenes towards the start of Alpha promise that it will be the Ducournau version of an apocalypse zombie thriller. Paranoia rises to hysteria at the hospital, where a security agent has trouble keeping the infected outside and at school, where students flee as a pool are dyed red with alpha blood. Located in a dilapidated alternative reality, in which light and deaf hard colors suggest that the end is near, the film has sequences reminiscent of everything, 28 days later in the First World War, but Ducournau gives them their own unique and disturbing poetic atmosphere.

The disappointing part is that, in the end, it does so little with the disease of turning towards stone. Fly between two periods (you must keep an attentive eye on Farahani’s haircut to say which is which), the film takes place in the 1980s and the 90s. The virus is associated with homosexuals and shared needles. And people who have the virus, or who are suspected of having it, are treated with homophobia and ignorance. In short, the scenario is an analogy for the AIDS epidemic, as Ducournau recognized.

There is nothing wrong with that, in itself. Films often use fictitious diseases to comment on the real ones. The problem with Alpha is that fictitious disease does not shed new light on its non -fictitious counterpart, and it does not develop it to build a more resonant and universal myth. The metaphor is not rich. The virus is AIDS by another name, and that’s it. Indeed, for a large part of the operating time, the film moves away from the magic-realistic aspects of the condition, which is a waste of a visual effect as fabulously designed and executed. The characters seem to forget that they turn to stone, nobody never discusses the origins of the virus or potential healing, and the overcrowding and the panic he has caused to the hospital is simply evaporated. What we have left is an intimate drama on three family members who are shaken by dependence and illness.

This raises the concern concerned about the reason why Ducournau cared about the science fiction elements of the film. If Alpha is essentially a film on a doctor who takes care of his brother Toxicoma and that the teenager took between them, why disguise it with magic realism? In a first scene, the Alpha professor reads the poem of Edgar Allen Poe, a dream in a dream, and shortly after, the fantastic adventures of Terry Gilliam by Baron Munchausen are shown on television, so Ducournau gives us a warning that his own story should not be taken literally. But it seems strangely unlikely to get involved either to fantasy or reality, which is why, for all the sound and fury of its hallucinatory imagery, that does not mean much. The confused history of Amin’s dependence is short of insight and plausible details, and yet the history of the spine of the supernatural epidemic is also patinated.

Ducournau jumped between different genres in his work before, but Alpha could have been more powerful if she had stuck to one. Since she was rightly celebrated for her intrepid choices, he feels a little loose that she did not try a film on AIDS without any bizarre horror rolled around him.