![‘Alpha’: Julia Ducournau on Staying Connected to Humanity Inside Horror [Interview]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/25085941/Select-%E2%80%98Alpha-Julia-Ducournau-on-Staying-Connected-to-Humanity-Inside-Horror-Interview-%E2%80%98Alpha-Julia-Ducournau-on-Staying-Connected-to-Humanity-Inside-Horror-Interview-.jpg "‘Alpha’: Julia Ducournau on Staying Connected to Humanity Inside Horror [Interview]")
Don’t reduce Julia Ducournau’s “Alpha” to something as simple as body horror or an allegory for AIDS. Both elements come into play in the “Raw” and “Titane” writer-director’s third feature, sure. Yet neither label feels sufficient to describe all the sensorial and sentimental territory covered in the film, which traverses genre boundaries to vividly reimagine the feelings of fear and shame created by the late 20th century’s pandemic.
Ducournau’s fondness for the maximalist has, in turn, produced similarly extreme reactions from critics and fans. Those hoping the Palme d’Or-winning director was going to offer another iteration of her previous triumphs were bound for disappointment. (Not this site out of Cannes nearly a year ago, however.)
If “Alpha” resembles anything familiar, it hews most closely to the beats of a coming-of-age narrative. Through a series of intense trials, the titular French-Algerian teenager (Mélissa Boros) learns her place in the world. This growth is most acutely observed in relation to her much-beleaguered mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a nurse who cares for patients afflicted by a mysterious virus that turns their bodies into marble.
That work comes home with the mother — referred to only by her archetypal name — when her drug addicted brother, Amin (a hauntingly gaunt Tahar Rahim), returns in a near-death condition. Thirteen-year-old Alpha complicates the strained situation further by using a shared needle to receive a tattoo at a party. The infection that comes to devour this area of her skin reawakens familial trauma from the past that ultimately comes to subsume the present. Even as “Alpha” shifts imperceptibly between reality and memory amidst her sensory maelstrom, Ducournau remains rooted in sincere empathy and emotion for the characters and their condition.
Ducournau recently stopped in New York to present the film at the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema festival, where she chatted with The Playlist about “Alpha.” The conversation covered how she determined the film’s structure, why the image of red dust was so integral to the story, and who she most identifies with among her characters.
I was so struck by the opening scene where Alpha is connecting the dots of the sores. Is that at all indicative of what you’re doing in the film at large, attempting to impose logic and artistry on the randomness of disease?
Definitely, this first scene is a foreshadowing of the journey that Alpha is going to go through, which is a journey of memory. I think that’s how memory works: you tend to connect the dots between things that you think you remember, but have been distorted through time, and things that you actually have fantasized. [These are] things that have been told to you by a third party.
Memory is all about trying to make sense out of it and creating a cohesive pattern and, in the end, will be the myth of your own life. I do believe that, as far as our memory is concerned, there is no objective truth. There is a lot of emotional movement at stake. Emotion is very mutable, especially through time, and when we’re talking about trauma, which is not linear at all. We can talk about it later if we’re talking about the structure of the film. Still, you see this pattern, this constellation, that she’s drawing on her uncle’s arm; it’s definitely a visualization of what her journey through the film will be.
You did literally anticipate my next question: because trauma doesn’t map neatly to a three-act framework, what structure were you looking to build that honored Alpha’s experience without leaving the audience completely lost?
To start with, I’ve never really abided by the rules of the three-act narrative. I never do that for the simple reason that I really believe that all my films are an experience of subjectivity, and [they’re] like going within the body and mind of my characters. What they feel, you feel. What they see, you see, without asking yourself, “Would that really happen?” For example, the earthquake/tornado scene on the scaffolding, or the scene where the ceiling goes down on Alpha, all these are expressions of her own anxiety, her choking feeling within the relationship that she has with her mom, and with all the bullying that she’s going through.
Basically, what I’m trying to do every time is to really feel my characters’ experiences in your own body. So, in that respect, they cannot abide by very objective, rigid three-act narratives. It has to be a maze-like experience of the emancipation that all my main characters go through in the end.
As far as the timelines are concerned, and hence the structure of the film, I immediately thought that the time of trauma is not linear. It is always eaten by the resurgences of the past through flashbacks, panic attacks, images that blurt out in your head, and, at the same time, is engulfed in the anticipation of the future for fear that what has happened [will happen] again.
Then, you see that it’s a present that is actually never really there. It’s really like being pushed back and forth in this Bermuda Triangle of past, present, and future that makes you lose yourself. It can make you feel like you are losing yourself and going crazy. That’s why, from the get-go for me, the two timelines had to intertwine. This allows the audience to lose itself through it, until, obviously, it fuses both timelines in this scene at the hotel where we have ’90s and ’80s changing [between each other]. I purposefully did not notify the year every time because I think it would have gone against this experience of what the time of trauma really feels like.
The presentation of the bodies in “Alpha” is so tactile in showing their fragility. How much of that is a dance between makeup, VFX, and working with the performers like Tahar Rahim? Was it different than your previous films?
It was not that different. The way I work with body transformation, usually, is in terms of actual transformation. Vincent Lindon in “Titane” had to gain a lot of muscle, and it was a very long process over a year of doing weights every day to gain this big, muscular body. Here, in the same way, Tahar had to lose weight in order to fit the shoes of Amin. We started with steady prep on the actors’ side. It’s the same way it’s that I worked with, for example, Alexia/Adrien’s body in “Titane” was a mix of prosthetics and actual practical effects with CGI afterwards. It’s always a healthy 50/50, somehow. I do believe that practical effects really help the actors to have something to play with and understand what their characters are going through.
That’s something I can’t really do without. But as amazing as my makeup team always is – I’ve been working with them since my first short, so I really love them – the thing with the silicone prosthetics [on Tahar Rahim in “Alpha”] is that they are matte and soft, so they could not exactly convey the harshness and the way that stone reflects light. The rigidification and the specs of light were added in CGI, which was a huge work. There are a lot of details in order for it to be believable.
I loved how you bring in these contrasting elements of marble and dust, which carry connotations of the eternal and the ephemeral. You’ve said that marble was an early part of “Alpha” because it became a way to memorialize these bodies. Was the red dust there from the beginning as well?
Yes, it definitely was. It’s actually something that is, to me, quite logical. Let me explain. The red dust – and the reason why it’s red, more importantly – is because you see it stems from the scene where Amin’s back falls off. When I wrote this and was obviously confronted with the actual making of it, I asked myself, “What color should it be when she pokes the bag the first time, and we see this first trickle of dust coming out?” That was a very important question, because if it had been white dust, it would have made Amin’s character a creature or something different. It would have given a sense of otherness. By keeping it red, in order to make you feel that even the blood within his body has calcified, it was a way to always keep the humanity and body integrity of my character intact. The choice of this color was really philosophical as far as the way I tackled the humanity of my character. Because at no point did I want to make him something other than human. Keeping the humanity, even through the most unbelievable effects, was of deep importance to me.
And, there is a direct link between this red dust that protrudes from his back and the red dust that we have at the end of the film. Obviously, this is also a way to make you feel that there is this whole generation who have been swiped by the disease like this. This red dust represents the loss of them and their bodies. That’s also why it sticks to Alpha’s face at the end, because it means that no matter what, she will always keep them on or under her skin. They will always remain in her, and then you see how you know it was linked from the get-go because, again, it was my vision of humanity.
I’ve been fascinated by this idea of reparations for the AIDS epidemic that you’ve brought up in the promotion of “Alpha.” As you’re thinking about this idea, would the reparations be more for the dead or for the living?
Of course, both. There is something in me that is still very angry at the fact that there was never any form of accountability taken for the very obvious ethical and human drawbacks that were the ’80s and ’90s, as far as the people who were infected by HIV and their entire families were concerned. They had all been ostracized, put on the other side of society, and shamed for their lifestyle and for what society thought that they represented at the time. Bitter is an understatement! But that’s actually very dangerous because when a society doesn’t take accountability, it creates taboo, it creates more trauma, it creates the impossibility to grieve, and it somehow dooms society to reproduce the same mistakes over and over again.
It works the same way in a family and within your own body as well. If you decide not to acknowledge the fact that you have a problem, and then you ignore it, it’s only going to aggravate you. It is definitely something that I’m tackling there with a little bit of anger, as far as society is concerned, and also a lot of love and a lot of empathy for the patients. That’s why I was telling you that I was so adamant that I needed to stay in touch with the humanity of the characters until the very end, despite a very unrealistic iconography. To find the empathy through something that society deems “otherness” and the humanity in us and them was absolutely essential.
“Alpha” is a journey towards seeing one’s mom as a full person, not just understanding the figure solely in relation to one’s own life. Where do you see yourself in the film? You were closer to Alpha’s age in the film’s setting, but you’re nearer to the mother’s age now, so do you straddle both in your identification?
Yes and no. To me, it’s very obvious that I’m Alpha in the way she sees her mom, in the way she’s the recipient of her mom’s trauma, in the way she also idealizes her mom, and in the way she learns to actually view her mom for the first time as a full human being and not just as a maternal figure, but as someone who actually has a life that is filled with successes, shortcomings, failures, regrets, and who is actually a complex character that existed before Alpha did. That’s pretty much necessary when it’s about emancipation from the maternal figure. Emancipation is only possible at the moment when you stop seeing your mom as just your mom. That’s the only way you can take a first step towards adulthood, or at least into something that is your identity and not the codependency that there is in the relationship to the mother. I definitely wrote it, I think, [from] Alpha’s point of view.
Retrospectively, I definitely related to the contradictions that are within Mom, meaning someone who is dedicating her entire life to save the lives of others, but at the same time, completely denies her own, and hence has this death impulse in a way. Because she’s in such negation of her own self, and she’s so projected toward others, she’s a walking contradiction. This can lead to extreme behavior, especially when she’s confronted with the fear of losing someone she loves again. By the way, that’s one of the topics of the film: fear and love are two sides of the same coin. The first thing when you love someone, fall in love with someone, or have a child is like, “Oh, I love that person so much. I’m so scared of losing them.” It really goes together, and as an adult, I can relate 100%.
“Alpha” releases in U.S. theaters beginning Friday, March 27.
