Julia Ducournau Stuns Cannes With ‘Alpha’ (2025)

Count on Julia Ducournau to leave Cannes speechless.

The French director, who shocked and stunned the world’s biggest film festival in 2021 when her body horror masterpiece Titane won the Palme d’Or, returned with her latest genre-mash up, Alpha.

Ducourau walked the red carpet with her cast, including Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani and Emma Mackey, with Cannes jury president Juliette Binoche and actress Vicky Krieps also in attendance.

The Cannes crowd gave Ducournau and her team enthusiastic applause and quite a few cheers for the AIDS-coded horror drama about a mysterious virus and the fear and social exclusion it evokes. While considerably less violent and provocative than her Palme d’Or winner Titane, Alpha proved just as moving, with several of the castmembers drying their eyes as the house lights came up. There was particularly loud applause for Melissa Boros, who plays the titular Alpha, for Farahani as her mother, and Rahim as her uncle, a junkie infected with the virus.

But the loudest cheers were for Ducournau. The home crowd continued to cheer her on through a solid 11-minute standing ovation.

The ’80s set Alpha imagines a fictitious epidemic closely inspired by the AIDS crisis, following Alpha, a troubled 13-year-old who lives with her single mom, who is rejected by her classmates because of a rumor spreading that she’s been infected with a new disease. One day, she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm and her and her mother’s world collapse. Newcomer Mélissa Boros plays Alpha, with Golshifteh Farahanias the mother.Tahar Rahim and Emma Mackey co-star.

Neon, which released Titane (part of its 5-year unbroken run of picking the Palme d’Or winner), picked up North American rights to Alpha last year, shortly before the film began shooting.