Directed by Julia Ducournau | France | 2024 | 2h8m | Presented in the original French with English subtitles.
Alpha marks a shift in Julia Ducournau’s work without abandoning her core concerns. Where her earlier films focused on bodily transformation and extremity, Alpha turns its attention to fear itself, how it spreads, how it isolates, and how communities react when they sense a threat they do not fully understand.
The film follows a young teenage girl whose life is changed forever by a seemingly minor event. What matters is not the incident itself, but the reaction it triggers. Rumour moves faster than fact. Anxiety replaces care. Authority steps in where empathy retreats. Ducournau is less interested in explaining than in observing how panic reorganises social behaviour.
The body remains central, but here it functions as a site of projection rather than spectacle. Adults scrutinise, diagnose, and speculate. Institutions respond defensively.
Ducournau’s direction is intimate. Anyone who has seen her previous films might recall how she likes to keep the camera, creating a sense of physical unease without relying on shock. Sound design also plays a key role in ALPHA, with everyday spaces gradually feeling hostile.
ALPHA resists clean allegory. It can be read through lenses of illness, adolescence, social stigma, or moral panic, but it refuses to settle into a single interpretation. This ambiguity is deliberate. The film asks how quickly communities decide who belongs and who must be contained.
Location: FOMO Secret Cinema, Bazari Orbeliani, Tbilisi.
How to find FOMO: Enter via Atoneli St above Carrefour. Take the stairs immediately on your left behind the jewellery stand. The cinema entrance is one flight up in the stairwell.
FOMO Secret Cinema • Bazari Orbeliani, 0105 Tbilisi, Georgia
