London Film Festival 2025 – Alpha ★★★★

Released: 14th November 2025 (UK)

Director: Julia Ducournau

Starring: Mélissa Boros, Golshifteh Farahani, Tahar Rahim & Emma Mackey

It’s hard not to fall in love with Julia Ducournau’s total empathy for the abject, the oppressively othered and maybe, most importantly, the monsters. Off of the back of her blistering Palme d’Or win for Titane, Ducournau returns with the deeply melancholic and emotionally taxing Alpha. A work entrenched in ideas of unconditional love, generational trauma, infection and otherness, Alpha is Julia Ducournau’s greatest coalescing of themes and formal intricacies to date.

Mélissa Boros beautifully portrays the titular Alpha, a thirteen year old who lives with her Doctor mother, Maman, intricately performed by Golshifteh Farahani. Alpha opens as it wishes to go on, with macrophotography of a younger Alpha drawing lines between the intravenous puncture marks on the forearm of her emaciated Uncle Amin — played with sheer complexity and physicality by Tahar Rahim. This scene is followed by further macrophotography, but this time it is Alpha’s skin being punctured. Ink drips off of a dirty needle, entering her skin until its revealed that a large ‘A’ has been perforated into her left arm. With a clear allegory to HIV and AIDS, alongside other blood-borne viruses and STI’s, Julia’s
Alpha begins to seep into the viewer’s skin.

In the midst of a blood-infection that consumes this unknown metropolis, a viral infection that ends up turning those infected into marble, the fear of Alpha becoming contaminated to this virus sets off an all-consuming, perpetualnightmare for Alpha, her family and those that she comes into contact with. Her Maman, works in the hospital ward that offers critical support to those who find themselves at the end of life. Ducournau takes the utmost care in the portrayal of those infected, giving a voice to the oppressed and marginalised. From sensitive close-ups of the body losing its original form, to the comforting embrace of these patients and the conversations they have with Maman and Infirmiére — the French speaking Emma Mackey. Alpha, too, shares an incredible affinity with those subjected to the affliction. A standout scene with Alpha’s English teacher and his male-partner in the hospital waiting room, presents Alpha as a teenager with humanism and emotional wisdom beyond her years as she comforts and treats the infected with love and compassion.

This is juxtaposed by the society and world around her. Her classmates other her, abusing and marginalising her. This is compounded by the constant bleeding of her punctured skin, forcing her to constantly be exposed to vitriol and hostility by her peers. Alpha’s home life is not the safest environment either. The endless violent rattling of wind outside her bedroom window, walls that cave in and the presence of her Uncle Amin whom she now shares a bedroom with, becomes all-consuming for her. Her symptoms worsen, or are they psychosomatic? In one of the film’s most startling moments, Maman opens the bedroom door to a two-shot of both Alpha and Uncle Amin gyrating and convulsing in harmony. It is at this point that Alpha, turns its axis even further into a nightmarish, devastating final act.

Julia Ducournau’s Alpha is a truly perplexing, intimate portrayal of inter-family dynamics, unconditional love and infection that bleeds its way through the screen and deep into the subconscious of any witness. From the unbearable, washed out colour palette to an oppressive montage cut too Nick Cave’s live-rendition of The Mercy Seat, and with an eternal empathy for the infected and the othered, it is
fascinating to see such negative response to Alpha. Julia is pressing all the right buttons and asking questions of our increasingly anti-humanist culture. A soul shaking, penetrating cinematic experience.