'Alpha' Review: A Maddening, Boldly Original Look at Overcoming Trauma

If you’re wondering what you’re getting into with Alpha, consider that subversive director Julia Ducournau’s previous film — 2021’s Palme d’Or winner Titane — featured a woman having sex with a Cadillac. Here, the Paris-born auteur moves slightly in the opposite direction, delivering something a notch lower on the Ducournau Scale of Transgression. It’s still as maddening as it is riveting, but she operates in a more meditative, melancholy register in telling a story about familial trauma as filtered through the AIDS crisis of the ’80s and ’90s.

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