Alpha

Bluesky

Alpha is the first. In fields other than the alphabet too, a label for the strongest, the largest, the brightest, a measure of significance, an angle of attack. Alpha is a person too, a creature of blood and flesh. Flesh that is marked.

I adored Titane. Had I not been so captivated by its elemental power, that Alpha is only Julia Ducournau's third feature would seem an improbability. One that no calculus, however lettered, could encompass. Her films have a sensibility that is capital-G Gothic. Darkly Romantic (another capital), her willingness to show us things as they seem to others is possessed of a beauty that has a character of its own.

Mostly played by Melissa Boros but in a complex chronology of memory and mythology the even younger Ambrine Trigo Ouaked joins her in breathing life into the eponymous Alpha. Her mother, a tremendous turn from Golshifteh Farahani, will sing her lullabies in Berber, draw blood, drive her across the city and through the red wind. Her uncle is once again present. Tahar Rahim's performance as Amin is a twitching thing, haunting, as with Farahani's a triumph in a film that's full of them.

It is deliberate and delicate, heavy in that craft, sculpted from light and sound and sand and stone. Ruben Impens' camera makes magic of memory, Jim Williams' score sits between a soundtrack whose willingness to play with chronology mirrors that of the film. There are small moments in steps and splashes, the movement of tongues, sand as from an hourglass and with the wind. Beethoven's seventh and third, Portishead's Roads, tunes out of time and of their times. All building to an orchestral uncertainty, a suite of sweeping strength.

It takes confidence to embrace uncertainty. Alpha exists in the intersection of the probable and the parable. Alpha will make the mark, chart the course. Alpha is first, what follows makes magic from those letters. There are numbers too. Years, ages, incidents. It is doubly a period piece and for all that I'm confident in the cars and clothes it is a set of tones that works. That music mentioned above, on top of which I must mention Nick Cave's solo piano version of The Mercy Seat. More of that gothic, more of that majesty.

I could go on about detail, extol the virtues of veins that might be prosthetic or pixels, and how their power derives from the impossibility of either. I could continue with how Boros' and Oaked's performances tear across time and space, Farahani and Rahim keeping alongside with rhyme and pace. I could examine how the evocation of trauma here is at once like and unlike that of Titane. I could throw around words like 'unalloyed' and 'pure' and how dread can be a thing metallic, material, of flesh and family. I could go further, but to do so would be to show secrets that are not mine to share. Instead simply this: if you have the chance, start with Alpha. If there is a formula for the fantastic, Ducournau seems to have found it. If there is a map to cinematic treasure then here it is not X but Alpha that marks the spot.

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