Alpha

After Raw and Titane, Julia Ducournau could have made a film about paint drying and the Cannes crowd would have called it 'a visceral meditation on entropy.' Alpha is neither paint drying nor Titane-level provocation. It lands somewhere in between: a body horror film that's more interested in family dysfunction than in making you lose your lunch. When teenager Alpha comes home with a crude stick-and-poke tattoo, her mother suspects the needle may have infected her with a mysterious bloodborne disease spreading through the community. What follows is less medical thriller and more slow-burn domestic implosion.

Tahar Rahim anchors the film as Alpha's father, delivering the kind of restrained, simmering performance that makes you understand why Ducournau cast him. The family dynamics are genuinely compelling: a recovering heroin addict uncle re-entering their lives, a mother whose hospital work forces her to confront the epidemic's reality daily, and Alpha herself caught between adolescent rebellion and genuine danger. When the film focuses on these human tensions, with the disease as metaphor for all the things families refuse to talk about, it's excellent.

The problem is Ducournau's screenplay can't decide if it wants to be subtle or shocking. The body horror moments feel grafted onto a film that would have been stronger without them, as if Ducournau felt obligated to deliver the gross-out moments her reputation demands. The Cannes nomination makes sense because this is exactly the kind of ambitious, imperfect film that festival juries love to argue about. For general audiences, it's a well-acted family drama that occasionally remembers it's supposed to be a horror film and briefly becomes one.

The Cannes premiere generated exactly the kind of 'divisive masterpiece or pretentious misfire?' discourse that A24 distribution teams dream about. The marketing writes itself when your director's last film featured a woman having sex with a car.