Alpha

Whenever a teacher in a movie lectures about a work of classical literature or poetry, it goes without saying that the filmmaker wants the audience to consider how it relates to the onscreen story. In Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, Finnegan Oldfield (from Nocturama, 2016) plays an instructor who asks his class about the meaning of Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Dream Within a Dream” from 1849. Its two stanzas end with the same phrase: “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” This intertextual nod raises questions about the film’s events and which of them are real or imagined, and the degree to which all life exists in a transitory state, particularly as it relates to the human body. Just as Ducournau did in her previous two features, she explores how cruel and judgmental people can be toward those who are different from them. People often act awfully toward those who have perceived differences from the so-called norms, dehumanizing others out of fear or social self-preservation, especially when it comes to contracting a disease or dealing with people who have an addiction. Ducournau encases these ideas inside a bizarre, affecting coming-of-age tale in which the French writer-director meditates on family, drug abuse, and the paranoia surrounding disease.

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