anywhere out of the world: ALPHA : The film that squints more than its heroine

ALPHA by Julia Ducournau: When Cinema Goes Off the Rails (and Without a Helmet)

There are films that leave you speechless.

And then there's ALPHA, the latest UFO from Julia Ducournau, which rather leaves you with a sigh, a few headaches, and an irrepressible desire to watch a good old Fast & Furious just to regain a sense of the word "structure."

After the thunderous Titane, Palme d'Or at Cannes three years ago — a mix of body horror, V8 engine, and deviant poetry — we were naturally expecting Ducournau to take a turn.

And indeed she did. Very strongly. So strongly that she left the artistic road to dash headlong into a conceptual concrete wall.

Mise-en-scene? What mise-en-scene?

Here, the camera seems lost, disoriented, like a drone with a GPS malfunction. We never know if Ducournau is directing her film or if it’s the film that is directing her.

It trembles, it wobbles, it spins around emptiness with blind confidence.

The slightest shot seems to scream: 'Look how significant I am!' when it means nothing, or worse: it mimics intelligence without ever invoking it.

Aesthetically... it's a no.

ALPHA is ugly.

Not ugly in a disturbing or transgressive sense.

Ugly like a failed contemporary installation in a municipal hall: drab colors, flat lighting, gray-blue filters seen a thousand times, and a sense of composition that could be entrusted to an intern on acid.

The film seems to believe that ugliness = boldness.

But no.

Ugliness without an idea = laziness.

And the actors...

We don't blame them, but it's hard not to notice that the casting seems to have been done backwards.

The faces are chosen not for their expressiveness, but for their ability to illustrate an aesthetic manifesto: 'the stranger you are, the more you have your place.'

This could work if the story followed, but unfortunately, it does not.

Charisma is absent, the dialogues are flat, and the emotion, when it dares to peek in, is immediately crushed under an avalanche of clumsy symbols.

A pre-teen heroine who is cross-eyed towards... what exactly?

At the center of the film, a girl in crisis. She is cross-eyed (literally), she is restless, she rushes through the stages of puberty with the grace of a bulldozer.

She is vulgar, loud, and unsympathetic — but not in the fascinating way of Mathilda from Léon.

No, just unpleasant.

And since the story follows no logic (neither emotional nor narrative), we end up losing interest.

An hour and thirty minutes of flacid chaos, where one desperately searches for a red thread, a theme, a stake.

Nothing.

Narrative nothingness wrapped in arty aluminum foil.

Politically correct, festival-style.

Impossible to ignore the casting that was clearly designed to check all the boxes of woke bingo.

Tahar Rahim lost 30 kilos for his role in ALPHA, probably to measure up to the abyssal void of his character — a ghost wandering between two scenes, as useless to the narrative as a semicolon in a text.

Golshifteh Farahani, the Iranian-Kurdish Monica Belucci, seems to have confused ALPHA with a kitschy adaptation of Medeea, delivering a performance as grandiloquent as if she were playing a Greek tragedy... in a poorly lit basement, with papier-mâché dialogues.

Diversity, fluidity, inclusion…

Very well.

But it still needs to serve a story, a purpose, a coherence.

Here, it looks more like a demonstration than a sincere intention.

In trying to please everyone, ALPHA ends up touching no one.

And ultimately resembles a soulless ideological collage.

Conclusion: back to square one.

ALPHA is a bit like those contemporary art pieces that you stand in front of for five minutes, wondering if it’s us who are idiots or if it’s just bad.