Rent Alpha (2025)

Stone Cold Disappointing - Alpha review by griggs

I was genuinely annoyed at the time to miss Alpha at LFF. Then the reviews landed, November was stacked, and it quietly slipped down the list. Curiosity eventually won out, though I’m still not entirely sure what I was curious about.

Julia Ducournau’s latest centres on a rebellious thirteen-year-old and her doctor mother, set against an outbreak of a blood-borne disease that turns its victims into marble-like statues. It plays a lot like an HIV/AIDS metaphor, though the film keeps gesturing towards meaning without ever quite landing any of it. People calcify mid-sentence, symbols pile up, red herrings scatter — and none of it coheres into anything you can hold onto. I loved Titane for its feral body horror and Raw for its cool precision. Alpha is far more muted, and not in a rewarding way.

Ducournau’s ambition isn’t in question, but ambition without clarity just becomes noise. Everything’s cranked to maximum intensity without the emotional grounding to justify it, and the cast end up looking as drained by it all as I was. You get the nagging sense a better film might be in here somewhere. Finding it felt like homework.