The Brooklyn Rail

“Want to know a secret?” Amin (Tahar Rahim), a heroin addict, asks his five-year-old niece, Alpha (this young version played by Ambrine Trigo Ouaked, portrayed for the rest of the film by Mélissa Boros) in the beginning of Julia Ducournau’s latest feature Alpha (2025). “I caught something,” he tells her, opening his hand to reveal a ladybug crawling on his palm. This line, repeated again near the film’s conclusion, is a thesis and a pun, cruel and direct in its obviousness. Amin has caught something: an unnamed sci-fi disease that the writer-director wastes no time in telling us, again and again, is a metaphor for AIDS. Ducournau conflates meanings, like the idea of catching a ladybug or an illness, through visual somatic metaphors. Images of a cracked desert landscape become Amin’s skin and his track marks. These scars, in turn, resemble a particularly recognizable kind of chronic condition.

Primarily afflicting intravenous drug users, gay men, and sex workers, this highly stigmatized virus turns those infected to stone; it marbles their skin, weighs down their limbs, and chokes their lungs with dust. Once calcified, the victims’ bodies become rictus statues, monuments to illness itself—until they crumble when touched. Ducournau’s adroit play with ambiguity previously earned her the Palme d’or for Titane in 2021. Here, though, she’s succumbed to her worst impulses. Wildly overburdened with meaning while simultaneously leaning far too heavily on the concept of ambiguity, Alpha finds itself infected by its own contradictions, its promise utterly hijacked by its commitment to the systems of meaning it ostensibly seeks to collapse.

AIDS, which Susan Sontag called “one of the most meaning-laden of diseases, along with leprosy and syphilis” in her classic 1989 text AIDS and Its Metaphors, has inspired this kind of tortured representation since its devastating appearance in 1981. The moral hysteria that accompanied its apocalyptic impact on the queer community rapidly took on overtly McCarthyite valences as anyone suspected of infection was ostracized, their illness deemed a cosmic punishment.

Alpha focuses on this aspect of the AIDS crisis, the kind of “infectious epidemics of hysteria,” as Showalter says, that accompany new diseases that generate “hystories,” Elaine Showalter’s term for such narratives and tropes. After thirteen-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) is given a tattoo with a used needle at a house party, she becomes a pariah before her test results are even in. The narrative recalls the case of Ryan White, a thirteen-year-old who was removed from school in 1984 after a blood transfusion infected him with HIV. Following legal action by his parents, his return to school resulted in ostracization and shaming by his teachers and peers.

Ducournau’s film holds real potential as an investigation of hystories, moral contagion, and what Sontag describes as the “reality-denying” mentality surrounding such illness. In this way, Alpha could follow the legacy of a film like Todd Haynes’s towering 1995 drama Safe. Alpha’s queasily intimate relationship to her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor utterly convinced her daughter is infected, is palpably familiar; her uneasy affinity for Amin, whose battle with addiction (the film’s other central plotline) is treated with nuance and without stigma, makes for an equally strong narrative foundation. Boros and, in particular, Rahim, are magnetic performers who thrive under Ducournau’s direction, circling each other like dogs and balancing rebellious, outsider cool with primal, self-interested fear on a hair-trigger.

Some sequences even live up to the premise’s potential, nicely encapsulating Alpha’s overwhelming adolescent confusions. In one surreal scene, she tries to sneak out for the night during an arresting sequence on a fire escape, her world shaken by an eerie, overpowering wind. Shades of Titane’s pathos are visible, during a cross-cut montage of Amin and Alpha letting loose during a night of dancing at a dive bar. At its best, the film takes on a dreamy, mournful, opiate-haze that lends its intuitive rhythms credibility.

Yet, this atmospheric investigation of the superstitions of the sick and those who love and care for them is never really given room to breathe in this unfortunately overstuffed, muddled film. The plot is elliptical, riddled with switchbacks à la the opening ladybug (which is not present when the line is repeated). Such vagaries feel more frustrating than generative, even in the context of a highly subjective coming-of-age story like this one. Alpha’s mother medically gaslights her; on television, Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) plays. Even setting the groan-worthy and obviously intentional Munchausen Syndrome joke here aside, the dialogue Ducournau chooses to highlight does little more than flatly allude to the film’s central take on AIDS-like panic and suspicion as its own transmittable disease: “We’re experiencing exactly the kind of episode no one believes.”

The plodding redundancies of metaphor recall film critic John Semley’s 2024 takedown of elevated horror in The Baffler: These films “feel as if they’re knotting in on themselves. They’re hermetic in the negative sense … play[ing] like their own term papers … [ideas] painstakingly telegraphed, italicized, and double-underlined” which makes any attempt at analysis “almost inevitably [point] back to basic, clearly stated themes.” When Alpha feels overwhelmed, the walls and ceiling of her room begin to close in on her. The tattoo that sets her down the road to social death is an enormous letter “A,” technically inked in black but usually dripping scarlet.

The biggest problem with Alpha isn’t just its complete lack of subtlety; ironically, Ducournau’s filmic rejection of epidemic hysteria actually relies on some of the very narrative iconography we inherited from the hystories of the 1980s and 1990s. A wan gay English teacher (Finnegan Oldfield) recites Edgar Allan Poe (“O God! can I not save / One from the pitiless wave? / Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?”) to bored students who homophobically harass him. Soon, we learn his partner has the virus, in a paper-thin, genuinely condescending subplot that treats the realities of queer people’s lives with about as much complexity as Philadelphia (1993). “You’re beautiful,” Alpha tells the sick man, looking at his granite skin. Eventually, we’ll see the teacher shed some tragic silent tears, teaching the young woman a lesson in dignity and mortality.

From a director whose allegorical work in both Raw (2016) and Titane has been championed by the community as deeply evocative of queer experience, these dour, respectable gays are particularly unforgivable. The scenes of Alpha’s ostracization are themselves no less unsubtle. While Ducournau’s singular style and tone keep them from fully falling flat, for all their visual and tonal appeal, these vignettes of bullying are the stuff of an after-school special.

Representations of AIDS, according to Peter Knight in his 2000 book Conspiracy Culture, are “often at one and the same time insistently literal and fantasmatically symbolic.” It’s a shame to see a filmmaker so utterly capable of originality, so typically attuned to striking the right balance between distance and directness, fall into such a familiar pattern. “With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling,” Sontag writes at the end of AIDS and Its Metaphors. “But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up.” Here, Ducournau’s failed exercise in ambiguity does all three, her metaphors crumbling into dust before our eyes.