institutional access

You are connecting from
Lake Geneva Public Library,
please login or register to take advantage of your institution's Ground News Plan.

Published loading...Updated

‘Alpha’ Review: A Potentially Infected Tattoo Sparks a Tortured AIDS Allegory in Julia Ducournau’s Rotten Follow-up to ‘Titane’

  • Julia Ducournau's film Alpha, a body-horror sci-fi about a 13-year-old girl with a mysterious tattoo, premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.
  • The film draws from Ducournau's experience growing up during the AIDS epidemic and revisits trauma using an allegorical illness that turns bodies to stone.
  • Alpha follows the protagonist's mother, a doctor, who fears infection after the girl gets a homemade tattoo, as her family faces fear, stigma, and isolation in the late 1990s.
  • The disease causes victims to cough chalky powder and slowly fossilize, and the film features striking visuals and intense emotional scenes, including a brutal attack on Alpha.
  • Alpha delves into the damaging effects of fear and stigma, delivering a poignant and tragic narrative that deepens Ducournau’s thematic exploration; the film is scheduled to debut in U.S. Cinemas this autumn through Neon.
Insights by Ground AI
Does this summary seem wrong?

35 Articles

All
Left
6
Center
4
Right
2
Lean Left

By imagining sick people who mutate into marble statues, the director and screenwriter goes back to violence against people living with the AIDS virus in the 1980s and 1990s. In an interview with the World, she evokes the filming of her film, notably the choice of the young actress, Mélissa Boros.

·Paris, France
Read Full Article
Left

At the Cannes Festival, "Alfu" was shown, a new film by Julia Ducourno. In 2021, she introduced the "Titan" bodi-horror, where the heroine had sex with cars, and won the "Golden Palm branch" as the first woman in the twenty-first century and the second in history to receive the award. In "Alfa", Dukurno again works with the "inanimate-inanimate" opposition: because of illness, people become marbles. Anton Dolin explains why it is an unforgettabl…

·Riga, Latvia
Read Full Article
Lean Right

Third feature film by the director of "Titane", this endless metaphor of the AIDS years, presented in Cannes, injects a heavy-handed symbolism into a posing and soporific narrative.

·Paris, France
Read Full Article

Tristan Piirmäe's Cannes diary included two films from the main competition program: Kleber Mendonça Filho's "Secret Agent" and Julia Ducournau's "Alpha".

·Estonia
Read Full Article
Center

The director of "Titane" offers a destabilizing and powerful allegory of AIDS and the transmission of trauma.

·Montreal, Canada
Read Full Article
Think freely.Subscribe and get full access to Ground NewsSubscriptions start at $9.99/yearSubscribe

Bias Distribution

  • 50% of the sources lean Left
50% Left
Factuality

To view factuality data please Upgrade to Premium

Ownership

To view ownership data please Upgrade to Vantage

TF1 INFO broke the news in on Monday, May 19, 2025.
Sources are mostly out of (0)