Review

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We always assume that illness is something that happens within the body, but the film Alpha raises a crueler question: what truly begins to sicken is often not the flesh, but the way a person is perceived by society. Director Julia Ducournau has not made a film about a virus. Instead, she captures how the world instantly changes its syntax, gaze, and distance toward a person the moment the words "potentially ill" are placed upon them.

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Genre-wise, Alpha seems to be discussing HIV/AIDS, but from a narrative standpoint, it almost deliberately refuses to be an issue-driven film. The story itself is unusually cold toward the virus—it offers no explanation of transmission mechanisms, emphasizes no medical knowledge, and provides no narrative of hope. What Ducournau truly cares about is never how a virus enters the body, but what happens to a person in society when their body is labeled as a source of risk. In Alpha, illness is not merely a biological term, but a social condition. The moment a character is suspected of carrying a potential risk, their identity instantly transforms into a potential hazard that must be monitored, avoided, and isolated. This is exactly where the film is at its most brutal and precise: it is never about how a virus infiltrates the body, but rather how fear infiltrates the emotional relationships between human beings.

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Alpha also thoroughly illustrates how modern diseases are falsely moralized. Society doesn't just fear the virus; it constantly attempts to reinterpret illness as a punishment for behavior. It distinguishes between "noble infections" and "despicable infections," and then dictates who deserves respect and who deserves to be ostracized based on this metric. Ducournau refuses to provide this moral convenience. She strips the audience of the comfort that comes from scrutinizing motives, forcing them to confront a far more uncomfortable question: why should a person's dignity depend on how they got sick?

In Alpha, what is truly contagious is not the virus, but fear. The film portrays this spread through deeply mundane details: the evasive glances of others, the hesitation before a physical touch, and the bullying and exclusion on a school campus. These minor yet persistent fractures constitute a social injury far more lethal than the disease itself. Here, the word "contagion" is entirely de-medicalized, transforming into a deliberately amplified social mechanism. The film is not saying that viruses aren't dangerous; it is saying that once fear divorces itself from science, it turns into violence. And this violence, often enacted in the name of "rationality," "safety," and "public health," strips the individual of all their dignity.

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If you are familiar with Ducournau, or have seen her films Raw and Titane, you will realize that her fascination with body horror is never mere spectacle. In Alpha, the damaged skin and petrified flesh serve as a precise deconstruction of the moralization of illness; in Titane, the shocking human-car union is a metaphor for fluid gender boundaries; and in Raw, the eerie cannibalistic urges represent a frantic, feminist French New Wave cinema. These are not merely horror elements, but frontal assaults on the relationship between the body and society. We are accustomed to acknowledging only three types of bodies as worthy of love: the healthy, the intact, and the risk-free. Alpha continuously asks: why, the moment a body carries risk, is it no longer permitted to enter the realms of intimacy, desire, and dignity? In this sense, Alpha is not defending a specific disease, but rather fighting for the right to exist for all bodies that do not fit the template of safety.

If one were to give Alpha a summarizing thesis, it would be this: this is not a film about HIV/AIDS, but a film about how the body is renamed. It does not capture a specific illness, but an entire system of mechanisms: how disease is moralized, how risk is personified, how fear is legalized, and how dignity is conditionalized. In this sense, Alpha is less a body horror film about disease and more a film about body politics. When society begins to judge people using illness, fear becomes far more lethal than any virus.