Recommendation | Alpha”: The Fear for Family and Fear from the Family”

In 2021, French director Julia Ducournau became the second woman in history to win the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, which many view as the most important award in the world of artistic cinema. This milestone was achieved thanks to her masterful film, Titane (2021, special screening at Utopia 2022). It is also the first horror film to win this honor. Consequently, upon its release – with thanks in no small part to her previous brilliant film, Raw (2016) – Ducournau was crowned the new queen of horror. This status, alongside the great honor, created high expectations for her next film, Alpha (2025). Her new film is undoubtedly a different beast than her two previous films. The horror atmosphere is preserved but its position within the genre is much more deceptive. Yet not only is it a horror film, it is a direct continuation to the themes that occupied Ducournau in her previous films – particularly the connection between horror, love, compassion, and family. In the following text, I will attempt to enrich the viewing of the film through focusing on the ways in which it builds and dismantles the power of family, by analyzing the three main characters: Alpha, her mother, and her uncle.

Since Brian De Palma’s Carried (!976), one of the greatest horror films of all time, female coming-of-age has been a subject of cinematic horror. There’s nothing scarier than changes the body goes through, the way they take shape, and our lack of control over them. Alpha’s character is a continuation of this legacy, but the film brings up additional fears and anxieties stemming from Alpha experience as a foreigner. Alpha is the daughter of immigrants, a second generation in France. On one hand, she feels disconnected from her (Berber) family legacy. She can’t communicate with her extended family and struggles to place herself in the history and culture shared by the rest of the family. On the other hand, Alpha’s greatest fear is rejection. During the film, we see her do everything to hide her tattoo, the chance she got infected with a disease, as to not stand out, and avoid the reactions of kids at school (moreover, she does not know whether she is sick or not). The disease in the film, that can be metaphorically equated with the AIDS epidemic, is mostly spread throughout the fringes of society. Thus, the film directly links the immigration experience with female adolescence, two experiences of feeling uneasy with yourself and your body, a lack of understanding or knowing where you belong to.

The film offers Alpha a solution through the relationship with her uncle, Amin. Amin doesn’t help her understand the disease or her identity, two issues with which he is struggling himself, but he gives her something more important – comfort. As opposed to her mother, who only searches for a solution and answers from the moment she discovered the tattoo, Alpha’s relationship with Amin is based on understanding. Amin, too, is dealing with his being an immigrant and with the mysterious disease, and much like Alpha, Amin has no answers either. But the experience of having another person understand what she’s going through makes her feel less lonely. While the film doesn’t cancel the fear, neither in film nor in life, it does offer a human coping solution – the family connection which the film presents as stronger than any other force.

Uncle Amin has an important role in supporting Alpha, but he provides much more and expresses another angle of looking at the fear. His character presents another subject that the film deals with: the inter-generational trauma. Without spoiling too much, I will mention that his relationship with his family is shaky and that traumas from his relationship with his mother have led to a serious hard-drug addiction. Throughout the film, Amin zigzags between a desire to distance himself from the family identity, and longing to feel close to them, with them, and specifically to Alpha and her mother, his sister. Amin’s character gives another expression to the power of family and legacy. On one hand, the ability to break a heart like no one else can, and on the other, fill it up in the same way.

The third side to the triangle of main characters is Alpha’s mother. This character is nameless, as she doesn’t see herself as an independent person, and only identifies herself in the capacity of her familial role. This is a woman who erases almost every distinctive trait about her in service of the family. As opposed to Alpha, who feels unease with her identity in the present, and Amin who feels the same about his past, the mother’s fear stems from the future, and particularly from loss – a foreseen, imminent loss. Throughout the film, we witness the way she dedicates her all to solve the problems and hardships of Amin and Alpha, when the direct motive is the fear of losing them. Her character completes the film’s dealing with the power of family. The only scene where we see the mother happy is at the family dinner. As opposed to Alpha and Amin, she is content with her place, but at the same time terrified of losing it. The fear of family loss or following a family loss is also a familiar trope in horror, from Nicolas Roeg’s brilliant Don’t Look Now (1973, based on the story by Daphne du Maurier) to the nightmare-inducing Pet Sematary (1989, dir. Mary Lambert, based on the novel by Stephen King). Although the source of horror in Alpha is unknown (and perhaps doesn’t exist), the fear in the mother’s heart is a familiar, human fear, a fear that stems from boundless love she presents and represents.

The horror with which each character copes is directly related to the familial experience, but is not limited to it. The film depicts the family connection as the most significant force that can build us up or destroy us. The thing over which we would fight, or try to run from, at any cost. The disease in the film is background noise, a tool for the characters with which to deal with their identity, past, and future. While the film deals directly with fear, to me the dominant emotion in it is actually love, specifically love that isn’t romantic and is unconditional. In that sense, the film also continues with themes Ducournau dealt with in her previous films – they, too, dismantled and built the family connection in the horror genre. Alpha is a powerful viewing experience which shifts between highly disturbing images and stunning performances expressed with emotion that bursts onto the screen. It’s a film that should be experienced with an audience, but quietly, each in their own head. It’s important to find someone to hug after the viewing and perhaps, if it’s possible and acceptable, to give mother a call.