“I’m not afraid to die.” The refrain of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ ​‘The Mer­cy Seat’ seems hard­cod­ed into the DNA of Julia Ducournau’s third fea­ture, which sees the Palme d’Or win­ner move away from the shock and awe body hor­ror of Raw and Titane into some­thing some­how sad­der and stranger. That’s how 13-year-old Alpha (Mélis­sa Boros) fan­cies her­self, reck­less and angsty in her ado­les­cent way, kick­ing against her mother’s (Gold­shifteh Fara­ha­mi) par­ent­ing with drink­ing and smok­ing and hav­ing an affair with her class­mate Adrien even though he already has a girl­friend. But if Alpha is the scream­ing gui­tars and defi­ant snarl of Cave’s first iter­a­tion of this song, her Uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim) is the soul-wrench­ing res­ig­na­tion of the ver­sion record­ed a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry lat­er. He turns up mid hero­in detox, sprawled on Alpha’s bed­room floor, rail thin, shiv­er­ing and sweat­ing through his clothes with track­marks on his arms. Alpha doesn’t recog­nise him; she threat­ens him with a knife. Amin just laughs.

The stab of a dif­fer­ent nee­dle sets Alpha into motion: when the teenag­er returns from a house par­ty with a crude stick-n-poke tat­too of the let­ter A on her arm (not quite a scar­let let­ter but not far off), her moth­er is under­stand­ably angry, but more than that, she’s fright­ened. A fatal blood-borne ill­ness has swept through soci­ety, caus­ing the sick to slow­ly, painful­ly turn to stone, and as one of the few doc­tors will­ing to treat the sick, she’s wit­nessed it first hand. Alpha’s clue­less­ness sends her moth­er into a tail­spin. Amin has already con­tract­ed the dis­ease through his drug use and she can’t bear to lose anoth­er loved one.

The unnamed virus is an obvi­ous stand-in for AIDS, per­ceived with the same hushed dis­gust by out­siders. In Alpha’s Eng­lish class her teacher (Finnegan Old­field) is sub­ject to homo­pho­bic slurs from his stu­dents; when Alpha lat­er sees him in the hos­pi­tal wait­ing room, accom­pa­ny­ing his sick part­ner, she’s the only per­son who doesn’t recoil. But the painful trans­for­ma­tion of the sick into stone relics is a curi­ous twist. They become mon­u­ments to the very thing that killed them, not just the sick­ness but the treat­ment of the sick – their ostraci­sa­tion and aban­don­ment. Here Ducour­nau posi­tions the dead as mar­tyrs, as wor­thy of a mon­u­ment as any king or gen­er­al, a tes­ta­ment to the bur­den of shame placed upon them by soci­ety which placed the blame for AIDS at the feet of the LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty. The bur­den of shame that rever­ber­at­ed for gen­er­a­tions and still isn’t taught in schools, as we slide back­wards towards con­ser­vatism in our present and run the risk of learn­ing noth­ing from the past.

In school, rumours swirl that Alpha has con­tract­ed the virus and she is bul­lied accord­ing­ly – she remains stony-faced, but her fierce defence mech­a­nisms can only hold out for so long, espe­cial­ly when Adrien turns on her too. She seeks com­fort in her uncle’s com­pa­ny, the only per­son tru­ly will­ing to be hon­est with her. (The only per­son who seems to tru­ly under­stand her.) Even dying Amin is fierce­ly alive, his mouth fixed into a grin like he under­stands a joke no one else is in on, as he’s beg­ging Alpha and her moth­er to let him go. It’s a tow­er­ing per­for­mance of pathos but not pity from Tahar Rahim, and the new­com­er Mélis­sa Boros, with her expres­sive eyes and wild ani­mal phys­i­cal­i­ty, is a rev­e­la­tion as his foil. There’s such lone­li­ness here, of a teenage girl, a sin­gle moth­er, a drug addict and scores of the sick, pushed to the fringes and bound by their isolation.

Mean­while the time­line slips between the past and present, as Alpha’s exhaust­ed moth­er becomes just like her own, grasp­ing at old super­sti­tions. Her ratio­nal, sci­en­tif­ic mind is trau­ma­tised by her own expe­ri­ence and Amin’s ill­ness as well as the new threat to her daugh­ter; she remem­bers how her moth­er used to think Amin was sick with ​‘The Red Wind’ and could be cleansed with water. In her grief she’s will­ing to believe in any­thing that might give her a lit­tle longer with a loved one.

It’s become a run­ning joke how many films seem to revolve around the vague con­cept of grief these days, but con­sid­er­ing it’s only five years since a glob­al pan­dem­ic, it’s under­stand­able that the col­lec­tive process of mourn­ing con­tin­ues to dom­i­nate art and cul­ture. While Covid was large­ly dif­fer­ent from the AIDS pan­dem­ic due to the inher­ent­ly homo­pho­bic and clas­sist nar­ra­tive ped­alled dur­ing the 70s and 80s that led to thou­sands more deaths and delays in health­care advance­ment, it’s hard to not see the frozen stone stat­ues of Alpha and think of how our col­lec­tive rela­tion­ship to death might have changed as a result of what we lived through (then and now). What’s more, grief is an unde­ni­able part of the human expe­ri­ence: to love some­one is to even­tu­al­ly grieve them. It’s an inher­ent­ly vul­ner­a­ble act, and Alpha is an inher­ent­ly vul­ner­a­ble film, no gross-out moments or big body hor­ror show­stop­pers for us – or Ducour­nau – to hide behind. Alpha is as thorny as her pre­vi­ous two fea­tures, but there’s some­thing lone­ly and long­ing here too.

But if death is a part of life, so is danc­ing. Kiss­ing. Laugh­ing. Run­ning. Hold­ing a lady­bird in the palm of your hand, gen­tle and awed, or argu­ing with some­one who loves you down to your bones. For all its cool stone, Alpha is not a cold film, and vibrates with life in the way Raw pulsed with desire and Titane with white-hot fury. Griev­ing is a process of let­ting go, but it’s also a process of find­ing the parts of peo­ple we’ve lost that even­tu­al­ly become a part of us – of learn­ing how to car­ry on even as we can’t forget.

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