This week Hope & George review They Will Kill You, Forbidden Fruits, Alpha, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice, A Magnificent Life, Refuge, and The Serpent’s Skin. Plus News & Notes from The Schlocketeer, Daniel Baldwin!
Tag Archives: Alpha
Blood Pressure
Alpha
by Hope Madden
There are drawbacks to being one of the most daring and original voices in cinema. Chief among them is expectation. Audiences anticipate that each new effort will somehow outshine the previous.
After 2016’s Raw, Julia Ducournau’s incandescent first feature, surely no one expected Titane. And I mean no one. Feral and unforgiving, homaging others but blazing its own wildly individual path, Ducournau’s sophomore effort took home Cannes’s Palm d’Or in 2021. The film that defies summarization managed to make Raw look tame, almost precious. Raw, by the way, is about a college freshmen overcome with cannibalistic frenzy whenever she’s aroused, if you haven’t seen it. Tame and precious.
So, expectations for Alpha, the filmmaker’s latest, were high.
The tale begins with its best scene. Amin (a wondrous Tahar Rahim) sits with his arm outstretched as his 5-year-old niece Alpha (Ambrine Trigo Oaked) makes his needle wounds pretty by connecting them, constellation-like, with a black marker. Simultaneously heartwarming and queasying, it seems the perfect opening to a Ducournau project.
We flash forward quickly to another disturbing scene. This time, 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) has her arm outstretched. She’s barely lucid, surrounded by teens partying obliviously, as someone tattoos an enormous A on her arm. The work is not professional and draws plenty of blood.
From here, Alpha oscillates between two timelines in an alternate reality France. The core story of love and negligence, family trauma and addiction, sits in the context of a blood-borne epidemic. An epidemic to which Alpha has now made herself susceptible.
The AIDS analogy is clear but expect Ducournau’s visual style to turn the somber into something harrowingly beautiful. Sufferers of this unnamed virus show symptoms of smoke escaping their mouths when they cough. As the diseases progresses, bodies turn to something akin to blue veined, cracking marble.
It’s in this world that confused, self-destructive Alpha comes of age. Her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor, becomes passionately, almost blindly obsessed with keeping her junky brother and her reckless daughter safe.
The crisscrossing timelines often rob the film of its momentum. The real problem, though, is that in the end, Ducournau employs a fantasy trope to connect the timelines and embody the mother’s anxiety. Vague as she is about it, and powerful as the final moments are, Ducournau cannot breathe enough life into the cliché to elevate it above cliché.
There is a haunting ghost story at work here. Ducournau’s cast is astounding, and her visual style, though far more somber here than in her previous work, is still enough to draw a gasp. But Alpha boasts less imagination than either of the filmmaker’s previous efforts, and it’s hard not to be a tad disappointed.
I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of November 12
Wow, a lot of movies worth passing on available this week. But is The Meg the kind of fun you want to unwind with at home? What about Mile 22—that can’t be all bad, right? And what the hell is Alpha?
Let us walk you through it.
Click the film title for the full review.
Alpha
Mile 22
Here and Now
Survivorman
Alpha
by Christie Robb
Visually stunning, but emotionally monotonous, Alpha seems like a planetarium show scaled up to feature length, given a sketch of a plot to justify shots of a human staring up at the firmament and trudging through various majestic terrains.
Set 20,000 years ago in Europe, a hesitant young man, Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee), sets out on his first hunt with the goal of making his dad proud. But when one of the beasts fights back, Keda takes a header off a cliff and is left for dead.
What follows is his somewhat preposterous journey to get back to his settlement.
It’s a little bit Cast Away, a little bit 127 Hours, with wide, sweeping shots of Keda’s journey that are very reminiscent of iconic scenes from the Lord of the Rings movies.
And there are glorious vistas to enjoy, any number of which would make a fantastic desktop picture for your work computer. But to properly enjoy it, you kind of have to turn the thinking part of your brain off. (At least a little bit. You still have to be able to read the subtitles to parse the Neanderthal language being spoken.)
For example, the hunting ground presumably is close enough to Keda’s settlement to allow the hunters to bring back the spoils before they, you know…spoil. And yet, on the way home, Keda climbs a few mountains, treks through a dessert, passes a swamp, skirts a volcano, and grows a delightfully thin adolescent mustache. For quite a time, he is doing this on a recently dislocated ankle and while carrying a full grown wolf.
Cause, oh yeah, he’s got a wolf buddy who he basically domesticates on the way home.
Billed as the heart of the story, Keda’s relationship with Alpha the wolf supposedly “shines a light on the origins of man’s best friend.” Given this, I was expecting the relationship to have a certain amount of complexity and emotional give and take. But this falls flat. The domestication happens so easily that it seems inevitable. I’ve adopted dogs that were harder to train. And despite the harsh environment and the occasional menacing hyenas, at no point do Keda and Alpha seem in any ultimate danger.
All, in all, Alpha would probably be best viewed if you’re jonesing for an easy visual escape or if you want inspiration for upgrading your winter wardrobe. Cause those suspiciously healthy-looking folks eking out their existence during an Ice Age have some beautifully made clothes. Now, I’m off to search for a pair of leather pants online.
