Alpha

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.

Utterly remarkable acting which brought me to tears more than once. The powerful performances are to such great degree that it overshadow the story sometimes. However, Alpha is a film I do need to rewatch; Julia Ducournau is not required to tone down her imagination if the audience can't follow, just like the mathematical Julia set. Music lovers are equally in for a treat.

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.