Julia Ducarnou’s 2021 Palme d’Or-winning “Titane” arrived in a blaze. It had a striking, propulsive beat, a tender, striking father-daughter story tucked within provocation. There was a raging, brittle heart within the bizarreness, the edgy extreme reaches it went to. The director’s style is bound to polarise viewers, but the follow-up, “Alpha,” awaited with bated breath, is a spectacular misfire.
It fails on all counts, increasingly flat and winding in a pointless, purpose-free allegory around AIDS. There’s so much blandness coating the narrative and visual it’s tough to take any of it seriously. Why do we need a metaphor around AIDS in this moment when it’s not even lent rich expansion? Tahar Rahim and Golshifteh Farahani are as committed and visceral as they can be, but their best efforts don’t suffice in creating a sustained emotional trajectory.
One almost feels sorry for their spent spirit, the complete devotion in their performances, especially Rahim’s intensely gruelling physical act. There’s no commitment to either the allegorical heart or the grotesque fantasy. Instead, it fumbles in its slovenly indecision, muting the instincts and edge. The director’s third feature is an utter disaster, sinking almost immediately after jetting out. This is a film too tame and simplistic beneath the showy eruptions.
Alpha (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
The teenager Alpha (Melissa Boros) kicks off the film in a daze at a party. There’s chaos, delirium, and stupor induced by the forbidden. Alpha has a whole life ahead of her, which is why the signs of virus infection prove to be a rude interruption. Initially, she hides and tries to dial it down. Her mother is quick to catch hold of what she’s repressing and concealing.
But the tattoo is an impossibly insistent presence, threatening with forthcoming horror as well as the trauma Alpha’s mother, a nurse, has witnessed. Soon, Alpha’s uncle, Amin (Tahar Rahim), comes tottering into the picture. The source of his infection is kept foggy, but his sister is fully determined to do whatever she can to restore him to the best of health. At the hospital, filled to the brim with infected, she struggles to maintain her composure and do her job. Her dilemma remains constant, particularly that of the caregiver stuck in a precarious position vis-à-vis the family she loves and cherishes.
Which infection runs into the past?
It’s a shadow of her brother’s fate that haunts her, powers her through patches of resignation. There’s so much to understand, empathise with, and reconcile with, given life’s crushing doldrums and tiring rhythms. Disappointment and heartbreak are immense, inevitable, and overwhelming. How does one live when battered by constant reminders of futility in one’s efforts and exertions?
Alpha has to contend with humiliation at school, singled out over her tattoo. She’s certain about not being reduced to a pitything, railing against condescension and abrasion. The film cobbles together peculiarly disjointed timelines and promises twisted innovation. These narrative ellipses and tears don’t lend the drama urgency or poignancy, but rather a confused hotchpotch of ideas, moods, and emotions, none of which cohere. Where’s the defining throughline? Inter-generational trauma splinters families and the loving.
Careful considerations of plot take a backseat to the dreamscapes the film forges, a skewed dance between the real and surreal. The momentum diminishes because the characters feel so resolutely trapped in insipid outlines. When the past is invoked again in flashback, Amin’s bleak situation floats in and meshes with Alpha.
The two get fused without either pinning the other. There’s a scuffle, a launch for re-possession. Trauma and bereavement keep Alpha’s mother in a desperate, unyielding chokehold. The film shows the teen’s mother hastening and overworked at the hospital, attending to and calming the nerves of newly infected and their relatives, as well as those in critical later stages of the illness.
Alpha (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Is Alpha’s sickness cured?
In a scramble between timelines, Alpha, her mother, and Amin collide. There’s a lot of last-minute reckoning, mournful reappraisal of one’s own crumbling lack. The director assembles and reconfigures the moving tracks into a heave of a dramatic scene. It leads up to a tense moment where Alpha’s mother barges in on Amin overdosing. It’s a scene of great, volcanic emotional churn. Grief and loss go up in swathes at the impending situation of a life being ripped away.
The final scene is wrapped in fraught ambiguity. Alpha’s mother walks her and Amin out of the car into a dusty gale. There are hints at an almost metaphysical blurring of bodies into the elements. Things are kept nebulous and intangibly out of reach. One doesn’t know where she’s headed, but there’s hope in the resilient parting notes, a conviction that she’ll pull through. The illness stays in a mist of incomprehension, as well as its cure. This isn’t a film interested in easy solutions but a psychological fraying where past unease and present unraveling jar violently.
Alpha (2025) Movie Themes Analyzed:
Stigma, Prejudice, and Shame
At the centre of the film is a running thread of anxieties around marginalization. Alpha and Amin are victims suffering and yet who insist on their agency. It’s a tussle between autonomy and crippling vulnerability. When the world is so divided and the rot so deep and pervasive, how do people find the grace of transcendence? Bids are made to re-invest their own undoing with affirmation and acceptance.
Alpha and Amin are more bonded than she would initially admit. But the cathartic realisation barely delivers. The needlessly jumbled tracks stultify the emotional payoff, nipping the reconciliations and coming to terms right in the bud. Too much is mixed around, and it furthermore triggers a series of convolutions. One wonders why the non-linear techniques were used when the tipping point here is so basic and banal.
The virus marks the infected with shame, humiliation, and ignominy. At school, Alpha is bullied and taunted. The tattoo mark sets her apart. We witness the world as it looks down upon, allocates them to bodies of difference, and stipulates severe judgment. When there’s so much discrimination, how does one find and retain life force? Alpha’s gay school teacher exists at the peripheries, his severely ill partner a point of emotional thrust.
The film even gives Alpha’s teacher a Poe recitation, supposed to be moving but landing as manipulative and tediously stale. Amin’s life is rent by tragedy, but his sister keeps faith, driven to cure him. It’s a pity the film creaks up intense emotion only to abandon it later. There’s a fundamental tonal uncertainty that muddies the film and denies it visceral import.
The filmmaker bluntly deals with stigma without offering any shock or surprise. This is a film of empty, rudderless provocation, more embarrassing than it lets on, as sharp and precise in its register. It’s as unimpressive as mired in soporific dullness. For all the bite Ducarnou had shown in her previous films, this is too mild an affair, too clueless in footing to even warrant thoughtful engagement.
