I’ve had stock in Julia Ducournau since her debut film Raw, and doubled down on that buy in with her follow up Titane. So naturally my excitement for her third outing Alpha could not be contained. An expert in body horror mixed with insightful ideas of grief and generational trauma, Ducournau has proven herself to be one of the most singular voices in cinema working today. She has been at the top of my can’t miss list her entire career, which is why it pains me to say that Alpha is her first major misfire. Tonally imbalanced, messy execution and some truly baffling outdated topics, great performances and excellent visuals aren’t enough to save this overwrought and maddeningly tedious watch.

I really can’t convey how much it saddens me to walk away from a Ducournau film negatively. You can feel her longing to inject more personal experiences into Alpha, but in doing so ends up feeling like she’s too close to the material and can’t objectively mine its purpose or effectiveness. Its fractured memory structure and non linear storytelling is actually a hindrance, which is saying a lot considering how much that was a purveying method of works from a lot of 2025 films. It struggles to put together its own crumbling pieces and constantly shifts its thematic focus, never allowing any of its ideas to become fully realized. Past and present collide with its commentary on grief, loss, pandemic, addiction, and teenage angst. I didn’t think it was possible, but Alpha sees Julia Ducournau bite off more than she can chew.

Written and directed by Julia Ducournau, Alpha follows rebellious teenager named Alpha who lives with her single mother who is a doctor. It follows two timelines: one is Alpha in the present who after receiving a stick and poke tattoo at a party that becomes infected worries her mother and two is her mother in the past who had to treat patients during the height of a blood disease pandemic that turns people into marble. Both timelines collide when Alpha’s heroin addicted uncle Amin shows up randomly to stay with them. Alpha and Amin begin to reconnect as he mother wrestles with her fear of her past experiences and decisions, seeing them resurface in the present.

Confidently Made But More Confusing Than Engaging

Alpha has way too much going on, the synopsis above not even beginning to capture it all. It’s clear that Ducournau cares deeply about past loss and addiction, and genuinely wants to explore the lasting effects of grief, mourning and clouded memory that can bring fantasy and nightmare to life. It feels personal, which is why it’s so frustrating that the storytelling is so distant. Alpha is affronting in its inaccessiblity, never giving you a reason to stick it out to see where it’s all going. It’s more confusing than engaging, and even when things come into focus and the reveals are shown it still never makes all that much sense. I understand wanting to use a pandemic as a catalyst for events, but centering the allegory on the AIDS crisis of the 1980s just feel so out of touch and the wrong device used to get your point across.

Films this messy shouldn’t be so confidently made, and Alpha is clearly presented by someone that has a lot of skill behind the camera. Ducournau may not succeed here, but she fails with such assuredness it makes you wish things didn’t go so wrong in the final product. She knows what she’s doing visually, and knows how to get the best performances out of her stars. Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani and newcomer Mélissa Boros are all quite excellent. They make the most of the subpar material they’re given, and work overtime to make sense of and elevate the messy story.

Alpha simply can’t balance its humorless plot threads and difficult themes with its hybrid of fantasy and reality. Blurring certain lines can be an excellent tool but can also be a detriment. And unfortunately here it’s the latter, unable to reconcile anything presented into a coherent examination of its ideas or leave any kind of meaningful impact. It plants itself in the wrong soil, and no amount of visual competence or strong performances can save it from the red winds of incoherence and strenuous miscalculation.

No one wanted to love Alpha more than me, and who knows? Maybe on a few rewatches something will click and it’ll work better. But that would require me to sit through Alpha again and if I’m being honest, I don’t know that I’m willing to take that leap more than once.

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