“Love leaves a mark.” That’s the tagline for “Alpha,” and in the hands of Julia Ducournau, that mark isn’t just emotional — it’s potentially fatal. The filmmaker behind “Raw” and the Palme d’Or-winning “Titane” returns with a new body-horror drama about a 13-year-old girl whose world implodes the day she comes home with a tattoo, in a universe rattled by a mysterious bloodborne disease that slowly turns bodies into marble.
Set between the 1980s and 1990s and inspired by the early AIDS crisis, “Alpha” unfolds in a coastal French city where fear spreads even faster than the infection. Alpha is a troubled teenager living with her single mother; when she returns from school with fresh ink on her arm, what should be a small act of adolescent rebellion detonates into full-blown family and social panic.
The film, written and directed by Ducournau, has been framed as her most intimate and emotionally exposed work so far — still steeped in body horror, but driven more by dread, grief, and stigma than by pure shock. Ducournau, who was a child when HIV first appeared, says she remembers “a contagious fear, a sense of shame among a whole section of the population,” and how society refused to face the crisis directly or admit that everyone was implicated. As she later put it in Vanity Fair, “It is a commentary on the way this fear spread, and the impact it has had on my generation.”
Front and center is Mélissa Boros as Alpha, navigating the turmoil of adolescence under the shadow of a plague and a mother, played by Golshifteh Farahani, who’s seen firsthand what this virus can do. Tahar Rahim co-stars as Alpha’s uncle, whose own history with addiction and infection haunts the family like a ghost that never quite leaves the room. The cast also includes Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield, and Louai El Amrousy.
Premiering in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, “Alpha” sharply divided early critics — some calling it overwrought, others already anointing it a future cult object — but almost everyone agreed it was impossible to shrug off. Now, with its theatrical release approaching, the film looks poised to test how much unprocessed fear and bodily anxiety audiences are willing to sit with in the dark.
“Alpha” stars Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani, Mélissa Boros, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield, and Louai El Amrousy, and opens in theaters on March 27, 2026, from Neon. Watch the new trailer below.
