In hindsight, it’s appropriate that I was the only soul in my Sunday morning screening of Alpha. After all, this is a motion picture about pervasive loneliness. Witnessing that kind of story with nobody in sight is tantamount to getting a 4DX experience.

The lack of noisy theatergoers ensured nothing distracted me from the saga of Alpha (Mélissa Boros), the film’s 13-year-old titular protagonist and daughter of an unnamed single mother (Golshifteh Farahani). The two live in a world rocked by a widespread bloodborne disease. Those afflicted gradually transform into marble corpses. Though fictitious and unnamed, this sickness is clearly a parallel to AIDS.  

The real-world similarities become evident once Alpha returns from a party with a tattoo sketched into her body with a dirty needle. Terrified her daughter’s caught something, the mother insists on medical testing. Everyone at school begins to wonder the same, paranoid that Alpha’s persistent bleeding is an undocumented symptom of the disease. In no time flat, they begin ostracizing her.

Back home, the trouble only grows with the sudden arrival of Amin (Tahar Rahim), her uncle on her mom’s side. A recovering addict who’s already contracted the disease, Amin is an outcast from the world. Just like his struggling niece.

Writer/director Julia Ducournau’s two previous directorial efforts, Raw and the masterpiece Titane, were body horror films full of over-the-top gnarliness. Acts of cannibalism and automobile loving were disruptions to the status quo. For Alpha, she’s made a film where tormented bodies and the unthinkable are the norm. People hurriedly avert their gaze from diseased people on the bus. Weak souls lie on hospital gurneys yearning for solace. Ducournau is chronicling a much different landscape than her prior films. It’s a creative tableau utilizing darker, often quieter realism.

She pursues that aesthetic while still dabbling in plenty of stylized flourishes, like the nightmarish reflections of Alpha’s mind and a disease that turns people into statues. Inevitably, juggling the allegorical and viscerally down-to-Earth creates disjointedness. For one thing, the disorder’s vagueness, right down to its lack of a name, creates an innate boundary between those infected and the audience. Too often, the film pushes the afflicted to the background, rendering them little more than a means to motivate the healthy, like Alpha’s mother. Compare this to the intimate specificity of 1985’s Buddies, a New Line-released microbudget feature that brought its characters—those with AND without AIDS—to life.

Ducaurnau and her go-to cinematographer, Ruben Impens, remain as sublime as ever in crafting evocative images. Nothing in Alpha approaches Titane’s mesmerizing sights, but it still delivers arresting visuals in its own right. Especially evocative is the coldness that radiates from scenes in which two people are physically close. Whether it’s Alpha’s mother holding her or the teenager’s teacher sitting in a waiting room with his sick lover, impactful caked-in anguish wafts off the screen. You can sense the characters’ misery only through their body language and how the camera captures them. The impeccable makeup work enhances the effect, capturing something otherworldly about the disease’s ravages.

The camera also excels at capturing a recurring motif in Ducournau’s filmmaking: loneliness. What was Titane, after all, if not a ballad of two adrift souls from wildly different worlds colliding? Alpha feels similarly consistently isolated from everyone around her. Sometimes it is as aggressive as her fellow students bullying her for being “diseased”. At other times, it’s the subtle division of attending a family gathering where she doesn’t speak the same language as her grandmother. Wherever Alpha goes, aching isolation follows.

The film’s visuals keenly express this. Camerawork and blocking consistently communicate how this 13-year-old feels surrounded by strangers while seated next to blood relatives at the family’s Eid dinner. Boros is extraordinary in this and other moments like it. With just one tormented facial expression at the dinner table, she speaks volumes about Alpha’s pervasive loneliness. Her work is one of Alpha’s most standout elements, defining its gripping depiction of aching isolation.

In the third act, Amin takes Alpha to a bar, finally liberating her from bedroom confinement. The expected reaction is an exhilarating gulp of freedom. Instead, Ducournau and Impens shift to handheld camerawork to capture Alpha feeling like an outsider in this space as well. Both the camera’s shakiness and its persistent position at her eyeline make the claustrophobic space memorably overwhelming. Such images are as idiosyncratic as they are thoughtful in presenting Alpha’s headspace.

The ambition here is incredibly admirable. However, the sheer deluge of elements at play frequently keep the characters and visuals aloof. To quote Hank Azaria in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, “Just simplify. There’s just too much going on here.” As a result, Ducournau’s jumbled screenplay sometimes loses track of its titular character.

This is especially the case in the final half hour, which sees Ducournau’s creative fascinations torn between Alpha and Amin. Rahim’s miscalculated performance, a bundle of yells, rein-ridden depictions of anguish, and constant scratching only make it more frustrating, as they draw attention away from Boros. Add in the sheer enormity of so much non-linear storytelling, symbolic imagery, and traumatic narrative developments, and it all becomes too much. Juggling fewer plates with more precision could’ve crafted a more involving and engaging production.  

Ducournau’s latest directorial effort can’t escape being less than the sum of its parts. Grave shortcomings keep it from greatness. Nonetheless, it is an undeniably interesting work. It is still evocative, intriguingly recontextualizing the themes (loneliness) and visuals (tormented bodies) that define her filmography. And if you see it in theaters, might I recommend an empty theatre for the ultimate 4DX experience?

Alpha is now playing in select theatres.

Alpha Trailer: