Director: Julia Ducournau

Stars: Mélissa Boros, Golshifteh Farahani, Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani

Julia Ducournau's follow up to the brutal and intense Titane is an overreaching jumble of allegories, albeit stylishly presented. Boros is Alpha, a thirteen-year-old girl who when we first encounter her, is getting a homemade tattoo. Her mother (Farahani), a doctor, is horrified when Alpha returns home. Worried that her daughter may have been infected, she takes Alpha to the clinic the next day. The hospital is overwhelmed by people who have caught an infection which turns them into marble-like statues. The treatment, as it is, consists of scraping the crumbling material as if falls from their bodies. As mother and daughter await the results, Alpha is shunned and bullied by her fellow pupils at school who are convinced that she has caught the disease, while her sort-of boyfriend resents her unwillingness to have sex. To add to her problems, Amin (Rahim) turns up, a shockingly emaciated junkie who it is revealed, is Alpha’s mother’s brother. The script touches on themes like otherness, disease, addiction and cultural tradition, but remains frustratingly unfocused, and the chronology-jumping and (possible) reality-shifting (one of Alpha’s teachers recites Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Dream Within a Dream’ to the class) leaves the estimable actors emoting in a void. Cinemaphotographer Ruben Impens’ rendering of Alpha’s surroundings in stygian brown and reds is suitably oppressive though, and there a brief lovely moment of shared humanity when Alpha tells a hospital patient that his statue-like appearance is beautiful.

David Willoughby

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