Alpha: When Body Is Renamed
​
We often assume that illness is something that happens within the body. But Alpha poses a far more brutal question. What truly begins to break down is not the flesh, but the way a person is seen by society.
Julia Ducournau does not make a film about a virus. She makes a film about what happens when the phrase “possibly infected” lands on a person, how the world instantly rewrites its grammar, its gaze, and its distance toward them.
On the surface, Alpha appears to engage with AIDS. But in its narrative stance, it almost deliberately refuses to become an “issue film.” The story is strikingly indifferent to the virus itself. There is no explanation of transmission, no emphasis on medical knowledge, and no gesture toward hope. Ducournau has never been interested in how a virus enters the body. What she interrogates instead is this. What happens socially when a body is marked as a source of risk? In Alpha, disease is no longer a biological term but a social condition. The moment a character is suspected of carrying potential danger, their identity shifts. They become someone to be monitored, avoided, isolated. This is where the film is most ruthless and precise, because it has never been about how a virus infiltrates the body, but about how fear infiltrates human relationships.
Alpha also exposes how contemporary illness is persistently moralized. Society does not simply fear disease. It compulsively reinterprets it as punishment for behavior, dividing infection into “noble” and “ignoble,” and distributing dignity accordingly. Ducournau refuses to grant this moral convenience. She denies the audience any stable ground from which to judge motive, forcing us instead to confront a far more uncomfortable question. Why should a person’s dignity depend on how they became ill?
In Alpha, what truly spreads is not the virus, but fear. And it spreads through the smallest, most ordinary ruptures. Averted eyes, hesitation before touch, exclusion and bullying within the microcosm of school. These minor but continuous fractures accumulate into a form of social violence more lethal than the disease itself. Here, contagion is stripped of its medical meaning and reconstituted as a deliberately amplified social mechanism. The film is not denying the danger of a virus. It is suggesting that once fear detaches itself from science, it mutates into violence. Violence that often operates under the names of reason, safety, and public health, while quietly stripping individuals of all dignity.
If you are familiar with Ducournau, if you have seen Raw or Titane, you will recognize that her fascination with body horror has never been about spectacle. In Alpha, it manifests as damaged skin and petrified flesh, a precise dismantling of the moralization of disease. In Titane, it appears as the shocking fusion of human and machine, a metaphor for the fluidity of gender boundaries. In Raw, it takes the form of an uncanny cannibalistic appetite, a feverish entry into a new wave of female cinema. These are not horror elements in any conventional sense. They are direct confrontations with the relationship between the body and the social order. We are accustomed to recognizing only three kinds of bodies as worthy of love. The healthy, the whole, and the risk free. Alpha relentlessly asks why once a body carries risk, it is no longer permitted entry into the realms of intimacy, desire, and dignity. In this sense, the film is not defending a particular illness. It is arguing for the right to exist for all bodies that fall outside the template of safety.
If Alpha demands a concluding proposition, it might be this. It is not a film about AIDS, but a film about how bodies are renamed. It is not about a disease, but about a system. How illness becomes moralized, how risk becomes personified, how fear becomes legitimized, and how dignity becomes conditional. In this light, Alpha is less a body horror film about disease than it is a work of body politics. Because once a society begins to judge people through the lens of illness, fear becomes more lethal than any virus.
​
2025.12.13
​