This outlandish horror about an Aids-like epidemic is a ‘disorientating, maddening whirlwind’

After winning the golden palm for the shocking Titane, the French director, Julia Ducournou, is back to Cannes with another nightmare film, but it is an insecure clock.

One of the most anticipated titles at the Cannes Film Festival of this year was Alpha, written and directed by Julia Ducournau. His last film, The Magnificly Bonkers Titane, won the palm d’Or in 2021, so the news that he returned to Cannnes with another cocktail and insensitive horror and a family traumatic relationship of the family had a Festival-Ashournnne-Fterhtmardehalnnnene-Affterhtnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnne-Segene.

It turns out that there is an abundance of weighter rarity. A disorient and crazy whirlwind of disturbing views, thunderous music and fiercely intense performances, Alpha confirms that Ducournau is a visionary artist. But once he has recovered from the experience of brain attacks to watch his latest film, he seems much less satisfactory and stimulating than Titane.

Alpha gets his title of his heroine (Mélissa Boros), a 13 -year -old girl who lives in a French city without a single mother (Golshodeh Farahani). It is not a special rebel, but one night he arrives at a party with a large capital letter, a needle carved by a needle the size of a stick. His mother, a doctor, is understandable, especially, since the fans’ tattoo could have given Alpha a mysterious virus that turns people into stone. As the months pass, the patches of their skin harden, cough clouds of dust, and any of those who atrophy in corpses made of white marble, cracked and creamy. It is a spooky death, but also strangely beautiful: in effect, the deceased are transformed into their own commemorative statues of the cathedral and the cathedral.

While the doctor diligently takes care of patients with this virus in their spooky hospital with little little, Alpha’s tattoo won the arrest of the blood, a shameful affliction that leads to their classmates to reject it. (This is presented as a despicable example of prejudice, but, in reality, children do not have children?) But the doctor not only has what their daughter and patients care. A person who definitely has the virus is his brother Amin (Tahar Rahim), a mischievous and charismatic drug addict.

Some scenes near the beginning of Alpha promise that it will be Ducournau’s version of a zombie apocalypse thriller. Paranoia rises to hospital in the hospital, where a security guard struggles to keep the infected outside, and at school, where students flee as a pool is red with Alpha’s blood. Set in an alternative reality in summary, in which severe light and the colors off suggest that the end is close, the film has sequences that remember every 28 days later to World War Z, but Ducournou gives them the owner.

The disappointing part is that, ultimately, she does very recently with the disease of change to stone. Floating between two periods of time (the Farahani haircut must closely monitor to say what it is), the film takes place in the eighties and 90. The virus is associated with homosexual people and shared needles. And people who have the virus, or who are suspended from having it, are treated with homophobia and ignorance. In summary, the scenario, an analogy for the AIDS epidemic, as Ducournau has done.

There is nothing wrong with that, necessarily. Fictic disease use films to comment on the real ones. The problem with Alpha is that fictitious diseases do not shed any new light on their non -fictitious counterpart, nor does it expand to build a more resonant and universal myth. The metaphor is not rich. The virus is AIDS by another name, and that’s all. In fact, for much of the execution time, the film moves away from the realistic magical aspects of the condition completely, which is a waste of such a fabulously made and executed visual effect. The characters seem to forget that they are resorting to Stone, nobody discusses the origins of the virus or the potential cure, and the overcrowding and panic that captivated in the hospital simply evaporate. What we have left is an intimate drama about three family members who are shaken by addiction and disease.

This raises the great question of why Ducourneau was bothered with the science fiction elements. If Alpha is essentially a film about a doctor for her addicted brother and the teenager trapped between them, why disguise him with magical realism? In an early scene, Alpha’s teacher read Edgar Allen’s poem, a dream inside a dream, and shortly after, the adventures of Terry Gilliam The Adventures of Baron Munchausen are on television, so Ducournawnawwnie literally so much you literally. But it seems strangely that he is not willing to commit to fantasy or reality, so, despite all the sound and fury of his amazing images, it does not mean so much. The confused story of Amin addiction has no knowledge and plausible details, and yet the history of the supernatural epidemic is also skated.

Ducournau has jumped among different genres within his work before, but Alpha could have been more powerful if he had stayed with one. Taking into account that it has a right bone, held for its valuable choices, it feels a bit cowardly that tried a movie about AIDS without horror ornaments in all wrapped lands.