Julia Ducournau's Alpha is set to premiere at Cannes next week, with today bringing some first look stills and further plot details for the Titane director's third feature.
Releasing in theaters this fall via NEON, Alpha stars Mélissa Boros, Golshifteh Farahani and Tahar Rahim and follows Alpha, a troubled 13-year-old who lives with her single mom whose world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm.
Per Vanity Fair, who debuted a new look at Alpha today:
Once again, [Alpha] also puts visceral, nightmarish focus on matters of the human body. But in this case, Ducournau’s lens is more potently allegorical. Her film imagines a fictitious epidemic closely inspired by the AIDS crisis. Toggling between the ’80s and ’90s, we follow Alpha; her single mother (Farahani), a doctor treating dying patients; and her uncle, Amin (Rahim), who’s battling the mysterious disease. When Alpha impulsively gets a tattoo at a party, she’s stigmatized by her classmates for what she may have contracted. Her mother goes into panic mode. Her world feels as if it’s collapsing.
Speaking with VF, Ducournau, whose body horror epic Titane won the Palme d'Or at Cannes back in 2021, explains more on how her new film was partially inspired by the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s, and how the mysterious virus causes its victims' bodies to stiffen and solidify like “recumbent effigies”:
“These are the saints and kings, frozen in marble in cathedrals, who have been struck by a violent death […] That cycle of pain has been repeating itself and transferring onto the next generations. This idea of recumbent effigies is something I felt was incredibly cinematic…. Although we know they’re not real, they look like humans, and so we can relate to them. There’s something that is so immediate in our empathy…within this image, where you have literally the association within one person of life and death at the same time.”
Vanity Fair also reveal that Alpha is less gory and skews less like body horror than Raw or Titane, but is a film closer to Ducournau's heart in terms of personal experience. Whatever's in store – we're hyped.
Check out the full interview at Vanity Fair and scroll on for the new stills:
via Vanity Fair
via Vanity Fair
via Vanity Fair
via Vanity Fair
