Alpha (2026): Film Review

Alpha has good performances and traces of good ideas, but they’re buried under aimless direction that just leaves you with an unpleasant taste.

Just explaining what Alpha’s about is a bit wonky. Alpha is actually the name of a 14-year-old girl (Mélissa Boros) who gets a tattoo of the letter “A” at a party. And because this is the director of Titane, getting that tattoo is made as unpleasant to watch as possible. Worse yet, when the tattoo gets infected, Alpha’s single mother (Golshifteh Farahani, of Extraction) suspects her daughter may have come down with the strange disease going around turning people’s skin to marble. Again, Titane director here. 

Alpha is made a pariah at school out of fear that she may spread the disease to others. If you’re wondering why she’s let back in school at all before her test results come back… ditto. This also puts a strain on Alpha’s romantic affair with a boy in her class (Louai El Amrousy). On top of that, Alpha’s estranged Uncle Amir moves into her home while trying to recover from drug addiction. Amir is played by Tahar Rahim, who you may know as the villain and his disembodied voice in Madame Web. Lastly, we regularly cut back to years before, when Alpha’s mother worked as a doctor trying to treat patients of the then-new disease.

Aaaaaand you might be seeing the problem already here. Alpha is about a lot of things, and each one of those things is a class of unwieldy entirely on its own. So much of this movie, especially in the first hour, lacks any kind of flow between these many different subplots. One minute, we’re focusing on Alpha’s treatment at the school. The next, it’s about her strained relationship with Amir. Then, it’s about her and her pseudo-boyfriend, and then her mother’s earlier years at the hospital, and then her panic attacks that I’ve yet to even mention. Just when one of these stories starts to gain a bit of traction, it’s interrupted, leaving us with a sense of total aimlessness.

Even from a directing standpoint, there is no grasp on the film’s emotional tone. To give an example, Alpha’s family gathers one day for a meal. They’re laughing, telling stories, and having a good time, but with a discordantly distressing piano score underneath it all. This leads to something eventually going horribly wrong, but why get us in that mood before there’s even a hint of something off? A lot of the movie works like that: it’s clearly trying to get you to feel a certain way, but the context is not properly set up with any logical flow.

I could still potentially have cared about what happens in the film if the characters had been interesting enough, but they all make such idiotic choices that my investment went no deeper than a tattoo needle through skin. I see the intent behind these mistakes, but they’re never capitalized on to make some bigger point or even further the characters’ journeys half the time. Especially in a world that’s mostly grounded but sometimes dips into purely “symbolic” territory, muddying the waters even more by letting things just happen for the sake of avant-garde strangeness.

I can see the overall motivation here. Alpha is dealing with teenage anxieties and isolation that compound with a traumatic, repressed childhood from generational scars. You can see how everything is supposed to connect by the end, and how a cold world creates even colder people in a way that surprisingly represents many of our own childhoods. I frequently came close to liking this movie once I caught onto these ideas. But then something repetitive, irrelevant, nonsensical, or pointlessly unpleasant would show up and return me to the realm of apathy.

The actors are at least all doing what they can. Mélissa Boros couldn’t have had an easy time nailing down a character in such a weird place, but she’s got the raw, angsty grit to pull it off for her age. Make all the Madame Web jokes you want – please, please keep making them – but Rahim is a good actor who shows those chops here. The makeup on the infected, though not extensively shown, is impressively unsettling, to a point where I could tell Julia Ducournau directed this movie without even having remembered that before watching.

There are individual scenes that really stand out as creative ways to show these people’s pain. The way it cuts back and forth between the past and present during a pivotal scene at a motel helped me better understand what they’ve been carrying more than any “straightforward” scene before or since. Having the world literally close in around Alpha during her panic attacks is pretty effective. And though the film is largely colorless in a way that’s obviously by design but nonetheless an eyesore, the very last scene is jaw-droppingly gorgeous and visually devastating.

Even though that scene recontextualizes everything in a way that, as far as I can tell, makes absolutely no sense. I try to not bring strict real-world rules into films like this with more abstract touches. But when you apply the big reveal to the rest of the movie, almost everything suddenly can’t happen without you doing a million logical backflips. The twist maybe could have worked with much more careful writing and editing, but the film just runs with the idea without thinking it through.

Really, that sums up Alpha in its entirety. It has its moments, there are good scenes, and you can see the outline of what it’s going for. But it’s way too much of a slog way too often for me to confidently recommend to anyone, and I can think of very little that I’ll find myself appreciating once I’ve moved on from it.

Alpha is now available to watch in US and Canadian theaters. In the U.K., the film is out now on digital platforms.