How Alpha became the most misunderstood film of the year

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"For a time, Julia Ducournau was known as the rising French queen of body horror. Her debut was the cannibalism-as-sexual-appetite allegory Raw, while her follow-up Titane, was a meditation on serial killing and family loneliness in which a woman has sex with a car. So, when Ducournau returned to the Cannes competition line-up this year with Alpha, four years after winning the Palme d'Or for Titane, critics were primed for yet another gory genre fable. Instead, they witnessed an emotional monument to the experience of loving someone in a dying, socially outcast body. Tahar Rahim, one of the film's stars, sensed a difference on the page. I felt this emotional aspect that was new to her cinema, he tells me. Describing Alpha is a slippery task attending to the storylines is less important than surrendering to its mysterious rhythms and primal emotions."

The Independent covers major issues including reproductive rights, climate change, and Big Tech through on-the-ground reporting funded by donations. The outlet investigates topics such as Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC and produces documentaries like 'The A Word' about American women fighting for reproductive rights. The Independent avoids paywalls and relies on supporters to finance journalists who report from both sides of a story. Julia Ducournau shifted from body-horror to a tender film, Alpha, which portrays love for a dying, socially outcast body within a French-Berber family and explores a rupturing mother-daughter relationship and the return of Uncle Amin.

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