Alpha

The sick body is never just the body of one, but the body of the whole world.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

From childhood, Alpha played at connecting with a marker the holes left by her drug-addicted uncle, transforming her marked flesh into a sort of puzzle game. This childish gesture, revealing both innocence and cruelty, becomes a key to reading the entire film: bodies are surfaces to be deciphered, lines to be connected, maps of pain, custodians of hidden traces.

Ducournau’s virus is never merely a clinical disease: the infected slowly transform into marble statues, assume a ghostly appearance, and emit dust from their mouths as if their very breath were decaying. Skin shifts from vibrant color to black and white, eventually darkening to a petrification almost volcanic, evoking the immobility of ruins. Cronenberg is the clearest echo: needles, wounds, contaminated bodies are shown unflinchingly, like a dance of dissolution. This marbling is both an aesthetic image and a condemnation: bodies become monuments to pain, relics of life frozen in final stillness.

The family dimension intensifies this tension. Alpha’s mother, a doctor, embodies science that never retreats: she tries to save her daughter, her brother Amin, and her patients without measure or respite. The other mother figure, her grandmother, evoked in the film—linked to ancestral cultural tools and primordial healing rituals—represents a return to origins, an attempt to safeguard life through archaic gestures. Between these two figures unfolds a conflict that is not merely personal: science versus tradition, medical care versus ritual, two ways of confronting the same anguish, the same guilt.

Amin, the uncle, is a central presence: a runaway capsule, a body traversed by heroin, a figure of escape from life. In him, addiction intertwines with the threat of the virus, with the desire to abandon, with the wish to evade the unbearable weight of existence. His descent is not mere self-harm, but an extreme form of refusal of reality: a slow desertion from the world.

The film does not limit itself to evoking the era of contagion, with its uncertain tests and the anxious two-week wait for results. At its core lies a more radical reflection: the transmission of the virus runs parallel to the transmission of trauma. Diseases, like family secrets, circulate through blood, through affection, through repeated gestures. There is no body untouched by the other, untainted by a genealogy of wounds.

Alpha thus confronts issues that go beyond the news: AIDS, homophobia, social stigma, discrimination. But also the freedom in the face of death—euthanasia, suicide, the possibility of choosing when to stop living. Ducournau allows the viewer to grapple with the torment of music, the progressive petrification of bodies, the dust that becomes breath, the red sand that returns as a symbol of both origin and end.

It is a film that investigates: the will to live, the inability to do so, the desire to leave the stage. Between bodies that dissolve and bonds that break, Alpha becomes a reflection on the obstinacy of science to save, on the impossibility of holding back those who choose to go, on the ambivalence of pain as a shared destiny. A cinema that does not seek easy empathy, but that conveys the rawness of the human condition: the body as a place of truth, disease as a mirror of being, death as a horizon that never stops speaking, unsettling and, perhaps, comforting.

To exist is an excess we cannot justify.
— Emil Cioran