It’s unclear whether Alpha (Mélissa Boros), the title character of the new film from Titane and Raw writer-director Julia Ducournau, is named for her generation. For that matter, Alpha has enough speculative ambiguity that it’s unclear when it’s taking place. But assuming it’s supposed to be roughly contemporary, Alpha’s age, 14, places her right at the forefront of Gen Alpha, the generation born starting in 2010, and ending around the time this movie was finished. It’s a significant detail, because while Alpha takes inspiration from a number of periods, it’s the first piece of body horror that truly feels informed by the nascent experiences of this newest complete generation.
Ducournau, a grown adult, is not a member of Gen Alpha. But she weaves more millennial-coded details into the narrative, too. The world of Alpha has been devastated by a blood-based disease that emerged roughly a decade before the film’s present day. The lethal virus gradually turns its host’s body into an eerily shiny white stone that resembles marble. Dirty needles and sexual contact are two of the most common ways to contract the virus, evoking the HIV/AIDS panic of the 1980s and 1990s, which older millennials may remember.
Alpha’s single mother (Golshifteh Farahani) is particularly aware of the risks. She’s a doctor who was on the front lines for the initial outbreak, and the sister of drug-addicted Amin (Tahar Rahim), whose habit puts him at risk of exposure to the virus, as well as overdoses. (Bits of these histories are shown in flashbacks, coded with more vividly saturated colors and a different hairdo for the mom.)
Somehow that family history fails to dissuade Alpha, experimenting with teenage rebellion, from receiving an amateur tattoo with a shared needle at a party. Her horrified mother whisks her away for treatment and testing, but they must wait several weeks before a test can accurately determine whether Alpha is infected. In the meantime, rumors spread around Alpha’s school about her potential condition.
Then Amin shows up on the family’s doorstep. Alpha, who barely remembers her uncle, is put off by her mother’s willingness to accept him back into their lives. Eventually, though, a tentative bond forms between niece and uncle; they don’t say so, but they both share a tendency to worry Alpha’s protective, loyal mother.
Though Alpha does show some of the virus’ poetically gnarly effects — bodies grimly beautiful in their statue-like patches, every crack producing an audience flinch — Ducournau’s latest horror movie is somewhat gentler than the more aggressive Titane (about a female serial killer sexually attracted to cars) or Raw (about a teenager awakening to her cannibalistic tendencies). Those movies chronicle messy young-adult horrors, while this one skews younger, before youthful mistakes become permanent scars — or at least, unwanted ones, given Alpha’s homemade tattoo bearing her first initial. Much of the movie is set right on the edge of that ruined despair, during a period where Alpha is waiting to find out whether she has a deadly disease. True to adolescent strife, she’s waiting to see whether her body will turn against her, locking her in place indefinitely.
How likely it is that Alpha has actually contracted the statue virus — is it still running rampant a decade after the first outbreak, or is her mother panicking? — remains murky, evoking both a youthful fear of the unknown and a youthful inability to fully accept mortality. Alpha’s mother is both intensely aware of the possibility that her daughter is infected, and vehement about insisting she should still be able to attend school without any fuss from outsiders. Alpha is really a dual point-of-view movie, so viewers experience the mother’s apprehension, even paranoia, about her daughter’s safety, alongside Alpha’s more teenage concerns about her social status and possible boyfriend. There’s a sense that Alpha was too young during the virus’ early days to fully remember the devastation that traumatized her mother.
Though the transmission methods read like a clear metaphor for AIDS, the idea of a Gen Alpha kid coming of age in the aftermath of a devastating viral outbreak also clearly recalls the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea that broader life experiences (and tragedies) inform parents’ relationships with their children is not exclusive to people living in the 2020s, but the hybridization of AIDS imagery and COVID psychology makes Alpha feel like the first movie to really consider the horrors of raising Gen Alpha in particular, seen from both sides of the parent-child divide.
Alpha’s mother is haunted, and has no choice but to share that condition with her daughter, even as she attempts to keep her physically safe. As in the real world of the mid-2020s, other threats loom in the background, socially and physically. Alpha’s family is Berber, with roots in North Africa, giving them a socially othered status. More directly menacing: the unexplained high winds that sometimes blow through the movie’s unnamed French location, lending the atmosphere an apocalyptic, uncontrollable air.
Alpha is more of a horror-inflected drama than an outright genre piece, which allowed plenty of critics to fixate, not unfairly, on its failings as an AIDS metaphor. Yet the movie has resonance beyond simply recalling the years of its creator’s youth. Unlike so many horror filmmakers, Ducourneau doesn’t seem fixated on inherited trauma, so much as the ongoing trauma of living in an imperfect world with a deeply fallible body. Alpha, with her open tattoo wound, bleeds easily; others with the virus eventually crumble when touched. Gen Alpha will have to try to stay intact, making its way through this half-ruined world.
Alpha is in theaters now.