Cannes 2025: Julia Ducournau's "Alpha" Beast

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In her highly anticipated third feature film, four years after the Palme d'Or winner "Titane," the filmmaker plays up her pain fetish, exploiting the ravages of the AIDS and heroin epidemics along the way. It's useless.

Melissa Boros in “Alpha.” (Diaphana)

by Didier Péron and Olivier Lamm

Alpha is the third and final French film in the competition after Dossier 137 by Dominik Moll and La Petite Dernière by Hafsia Herzi. The new project by Julia Ducournau, winner of the Palme d'Or in 2021 with her second feature film Titane, has been carefully kept secret, with a few images leaking in recent days. Despite what its title might suggest, it is not an exploration of toxic masculinity. Alpha is the name of a 13-year-old girl, the main character in what is presented as a coming-of-age novel about a young girl consumed by the traumas of a childhood in a dysfunctional family.

It is the 1980s, a contagious disease gradually transforms those who catch it into marble statues, their flesh transmuting into the smooth, mineral surface of recumbent figures. Alpha (Mélissa Boros)