Metacritic reviews

Through its complex structure, formed of different timelines and split realities, uncanny dreams and blurred memories, “Alpha” viscerally teases out the binds of love and trauma.

Ducournau's story is brilliant, but without the leading actors of the film, the movie wouldn't have been nearly as impressive.

As Alpha’s family becomes increasingly isolated, the film’s ambition widens. Though the rhythms of this can take some getting used to, the resulting emotional payoff is more than worth your patience.

Some may find this despairing and baffling, but Ducournau finds a strange layer of hope and love beneath all the dust and grime.

There’s a nicely intimate side to Ducornau’s urge to dig beneath the flesh here, a ‘soft body horror’ simulacrum of the hormonal changes this adolescent girl is going through.

It can impress with its utter originality and technical know-how, but there’s so much going on for so long that many viewers will be exhausted by the midway point, if not earlier.

It’s painful to watch such talents pour so much into roles that are fairly common, if not clichéd by American indie standards.

A disorientating, maddening whirlwind of haunting sights, thunderous music and fiercely intense performances, Alpha confirms that Ducournau is a visionary artist. But once you've recovered from the brain-bashing experience of watching her latest film, it comes to seem a lot less satisfying and stimulating than Titane was.

The maddening frustration of her first unambiguous misfire — which is worse than bad because it could have been good — is that it feels so much, but conveys so little.

The madly, bafflingly overwrought and humourless storytelling can’t overcome the fact that everything here is frankly unpersuasive and tedious. Every line, every scene, has the emoting dial turned up to 11 and yet feels redundant.