A plague brings society to its knees in heady French import ‘Alpha’

In Julia Ducournau’s films, her characters’ lives are frequently falling apart. But her third feature raises those stakes, envisioning an entire society imperiled by plague, the death toll climbing and panic spreading. Heavily metaphoric and less intimately provocative than the French writer-director’s previous movies, “Alpha” is a domestic drama that may not necessarily be set at the end of the world. But you can see that end from here.

Relative newcomer Mélissa Boros plays Alpha, a 13-year-old living with her unnamed doctor mother (Golshifteh Farahani). Ducournau never specifies her time frame, but judging from the low-tech televisions and absence of smartphones, it appears we’re somewhere in the 1990s, with a series of flashbacks taking us eight years further into the past.

Early on, Alpha attends a party and discovers, in her drunken stupor, that she’s the recipient of a crude tattoo of an “A” on her left arm — a youthful indiscretion that upsets her mom specifically because she’s fearful it came from a dirty needle. In this alternate past, a fatal blood virus, known informally as the Red Wind, has been ravaging the population for about a decade.

“Alpha” is a clear AIDS parable, including the way that the film’s gay men are vilified for contracting the virus. But Ducournau adds a haunting new touch, depicting the infected as developing a silvery rash across their skin before eventually morphing into porcelain-like statues as they die. Alpha’s mom, who works in a hospital vainly treating these incurable patients, doesn’t want her only child to come down with the disease.

As Alpha waits for the results of blood tests, she is startled by the sudden appearance of a gaunt, jittery stranger in their apartment. Quickly, he explains that he’s Amin (Tahar Rahim), her mom’s brother, whom Alpha has no memory of meeting when she was a little girl. The track marks littering his arms suggest a life devoted to a destructive heroin habit, but Amin’s sister is determined to nurse him back to health, even though this only puts more of a burden on the overworked single mother.

Ducournau shocked audiences with her first two films: the graphic 2016 vegetarian-turned-cannibal horror indie “Raw” and 2021’s “Titane,” an outlandish body-horror riff on grief, gender and queerness that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. With “Alpha,” she once again utilizes a coming-of-age narrative to probe the fragility and malleability of our physical selves. But while her previous pictures never shied away from tenderness despite their outré scenarios, her latest is a far more melancholy affair. Sadly, it’s also easily her least accomplished.

Boros is all surly insecurity as Alpha, her thick glasses and severe demeanor making her unpopular at school — a situation exacerbated by her occasional bleeding from the shoddy tattoo or the spot where doctors drew blood for her tests. A humiliating incident in a pool surrounded by her repulsed classmates echoes an iconic scene from “Carrie,” with Ducournau crafting an analogy for traumatic adolescent rites of passage like menstruation. But she hasn’t conceived the teen as anything more than a blunt symbol of pubescent awkwardness.

Rahim lost about 40 pounds to play Amin, every inch of his emaciated, wiry frame consumed with getting its next fix. In flashbacks — Ambrine Trigo-Ouaked portrays the younger Alpha — we see glimpses of affection for his adoring niece, but Rahim illustrates that Amin’s debilitating craving will always be his principal love. Never mind that Amin, too, has the Red Wind, a realization that occurs during a sequence that, like a few others in “Alpha,” is not immediately apparent is happening in the ’90s storyline or before. This melding of past and present is meant to create a sense that this family has been grappling with insurmountable obstacles for a long time — so long, in fact, that the participants can no longer remember a period without them.

But “Alpha” rarely transcends its intellectual trappings or superficial themes. Farahani is nobly resilient as the endlessly compassionate doctor, mother and sister. But her character succumbs to Ducournau’s convoluted plotting. Initially intriguing, the jumbled chronology eventually proves to be largely decorative until a disappointing late-reel twist explains why the labored device was deployed in the first place.

Even the film’s striking depiction of this deadly disease’s physical manifestation ultimately feels a bit too “poetic” — and, frankly, patronizing — to truly capture the agony of the AIDS and COVID eras. Ducournau wants to illustrate how fear itself can be a deadly contagion, a reality anyone who lived through those terrible times already knows too well. As “Alpha” reaches its stylish, dreamlike ending, she hits upon an absorbing final image that suggests the collective sorrow and emotional devastation our recent plague years have wrought. Tellingly, though, the moment has very little to do with her characters, which are yet again overwhelmed by her grandiose ideas.

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