Alpha

Saw Alpha last night and absolutely loved it. Wonderful acting all around, with Tahar Rahim as uncle Amin being the highlight for me.

It's not an easy watch. There's many layers and a complex structure. But, for me at least, all that adds up to a very powerful story that does bring me back to the scary times I lived through in the 80's.

The greater role for Uncle Amin in the second half of the movie also works for me, even though I understand comments that this is sort of a break in the flow. My interpretation is that this help broaden what Alpha goes through, from personal to more of a world-views building experience.

Alpha starts off really strong but loses the plot halfway through.

Alpha is about a teenage girl in the 80s who gets a tattoo, and her mom freaks out because she could have gotten "the virus." It clearly alluded to HIV , but the movie exaggerates it into a terrifying, almost horror-like disease.

The first half works great - we see how quickly she's treated like an outcast. Her boyfriend panics after kissing her, nobody wants to touch her, and the film links her to groups who were stigmatized at the time due to HIV (gay men, junkies, etc.). It's heavy stuff but handled well.

Then the second half happens. The focus shifts away from her and onto her junkie uncle, which just isn't as interesting. By the time the movie dives into its "dream within a dream" idea, it completely goes off the rails. I usually like weird, Lynch-style storytelling, but here it just felt messy and overcomplicated.

Alpha starts out as an emotional story about fear and stigmatization, but by the end the director is too clever and the plot just gets frustrating.

A movie not worth spending your money on it. Saw it at a movie festival , last movie aired on the last day of the Anonimul Festival. I gave it the benefit of the doubt until the very end and if I were to summarize it, I would say "hope dies last, but with this movie, it eventually dies". Nobody left the screening because otherwise you would have had a sleepless night trying to figure out what was the conclusion. After seeing this movie I needed an artistic cleansing, as in seeing any movie that restores my faith in cinematography. Go see again "Gandhi", "Black cat white cat" or anything else worth watching, this particular movie is a "flyover movie". Thank God it ended.

It is one of those films that makes you think. A lot. It is much less brutal and more poetic than Raw and Titane. It is not perfect but has so much meaning and reflects so much on human memory and intergenerational trauma that it is really worth watching. I was lucky enough to watch it at the Stockholm International Film Festival, with the director (Julia Ducournau) being present. We had an extremely enlightening conversation with her; she is a really intelligent woman with a rare artistic mind. I have loved all three of her films until now and can't wait to watch the next one.

Julia Ducornau brings us another heartfelt body horror treat, this time in the form of Alpha, a familly drama, coming of age story and horror all rolled into one. I really enjoyed it, great performances from everyone, worth mentioning Tahar Rahim's amazing phisical acting. It had a good score, tense but unobtrusive, ocasionally interupted by a couple of fitting and really good liscened tracks. The body horror elements are great, while they definetly still make you squirm, unlike usual body horror they are not disgusting, they are beautifull in fact. They come across horrific yet fantastical, more tragic than scary and that is exactly where the narative needs them to be. A grat fim overall!