The Cannes Film Festival aims to prove it is an A-list festival. This year, the competition screened films by Wes Anderson, Ari Aster, and Trier’s Affeksjonverdi and Alpha. The latter is the latest work by Julia Ducournau, four years after her grossly unearned Palme de Titane at the 2021 edition of the festival. As I mentioned in my Eddington review, it was the year when masks were mandatory due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The new film deals with some kind of disease as well. Alpha (Mélissa Boros) is a troubled teen who gets a tattoo while drunk at a party. When her mother, a doctor (Golshifteh Farahani), notices this, she insists on an immediate blood test.

The reason is an unnamed bloodborne virus that turns its victims into brittle, marble-like statues, with their breath emitting sand-like dust. If anyone thinks that sounds cool and will result in images with interesting effects, the sad truth is that Alpha is almost inexplicably bland and lifeless. The narrative includes flashbacks to the protagonist’s life at age five. Those scenes tend to be over-saturated, and the director stated at the press conference that she aimed to evoke memories of Kodak disposable cameras, which were common at the time. On the other hand, the scenes set in the early nineties, when the main character is a teenager, are colder and bluish with strong contrasts.

Alpha – The film infected by the virus

According to the director, the aim was to depict a society where “fear has insidiously seeped into the entrails of society and torn everything apart.” I haven’t even mentioned Amin (Tahar Rahim), who is the drug addict brother of the mother. For some bizarre reason, she thought it was a sane idea to let Amin take care of Alpha at the age of 5. The very first shot shows the daughter using a marker to connect the marks on his skin. The scene is set to one of the most overused songs of the last three decades: Roads by Portishead.

When starting a film with such an uninspired choice is not the biggest problem, you know that what you’re in for will be a tedious journey, in this case, lasting 128 minutes. There is no end to the film’s mindlessness, but it never becomes intriguingly weird. The whole affair might have been worth it if the film hadn’t been so inconceivably trite and boring from the start. Alpha is the disease rather than being a portrayal of one.

AIDS is the all-too-obvious metaphor, which brings to mind Léos Carax’s Mauvais sang (1986), which managed to do something visually and narratively compelling of a similar theme. Carax is also a reminder of one of the many films that would have been a more worthy winner than Titane in the 2021 competition. The entire film is filled with obnoxiously loud music for no apparent reason. There were moments when I was afraid that Nigel Tufnel would enter the cinema and urge Ducournau to turn it down.

I have never seen much value in Ducournau’s work, but I was not prepared for how inept her new film could be. Judging from the reactions after the screenings, neither were her fans. When I wrote my piece about a certain tendency in French cinema in 2021, which mentioned TItane, I couldn’t believe how weak the upcoming years of films from the country of the Lumière brothers would be. It raises the question of whether the French Ministry of Culture needs a DOGE department. It is difficult to see where Julia Ducournau will go from here. It would be an exaggeration to say that I am eager to find out. Alpha is as disposable as the aforementioned cameras.