Julia Ducournau’s Alpha is an oddly constructed film that feels consistently off-kilter, not due to its content but because its every storytelling and visual choice appears miscalculated. The narrative, involving a mysterious illness, a domineering mother, and a fragile teenage girl, unfolds awkwardly through a muddled HIV metaphor and attempts to tackle social issues that seem added as an afterthought. Its heavy-handed musical score overwhelms the obscured drama and tangled symbolism, making it difficult to take seriously as it progresses. Ultimately, Alpha might just be the least successful entry in the 2025 Cannes Film Festival lineup.

Rather than being frightening or unsettling, Alpha mainly confounds its audience, marking a noticeable decline for Ducournau. Her first film, Raw, a college-set story about cannibalism, had its shortcomings but managed to be unsettling enough to capture attention. Following that, her body horror movie Titane, in which she explored themes of gender dysphoria with an audacious approach to metal, won her the prestigious Palme d’Or. However, in her latest work, Ducournau’s obsession with transformation lacks coherence and focus, despite the initial scenes suggesting an enticing aesthetic potential.

The film opens with its title displayed on dry, cracked earth, drawing a parallel between the physical and the geological, as it equates the earth’s fissures with a human arm marred by needle marks. These stark visuals transition to a tender, softly-lit moment featuring Amin, a frail heroin addict portrayed by Tahar Rahim, and his young niece Alpha, played by Ambrine Trigo Ouaked. In her innocence, Alpha finds beauty in Amin’s vulnerability, connecting the spots on his arm with a felt-tip pen. The narrative abruptly shifts to a harsher scene, showing Alpha at thirteen (acted by Mélissa Boros), passed out at a party while a peer tattoos the letter “A” on her shoulder with a dirty needle.

Seeing metal and ink piercing skin up close yields a sickly jolt — it’s classic Ducournau — but from there on out, the director begins playing coy in ways that make Alpha feel self-congratulatory. Conversations with characters off screen, and sudden dream-like turns, begin portending twists that are only “surprising” in that you might not be able to expect them, but they do little to enhance or magnify the drama (or, really, help it focus). Alpha’s mother, played by Golshifteh Farahani, is a doctor who’s long been treating a mysterious disease transmitted by blood, the beginnings of which appear as flashbacks with the aforementioned warm lighting. Back in the more cool-toned, washed out present, she grows concerned for Alpha’s safety and soon gets her tested for the deadly virus with no cure, which makes her an outcast at school while she waits.

These distinctly AIDS-like fears and ostracization eventually give way to a matter-of-fact depiction of the film’s disease: the infected gradually turn into marble husks, practically becoming their own tombs. In theory, there’s a perverse beauty to this premise, but Ducournau seldom centers its conflicting, contradictory emotions with her humdrum depiction of its physical effects.

Alpha’s uncle Amin — still an addict, but promising to kick the habit — comes to live with her and her mother, giving the adolescent an outlet to discuss some of her feelings. She’s likewise a comfort to Amin in moments when the world at large can be cruel, but this mutual recognition of their plight quickly zips by, giving way to a story in which even its central disease simply ceases to matter. Before long, the film gets lost in complicated machinations about the relationship between its two timelines (whose color-coding is completely arbitrary, mind you), getting further and further away from its initial premise until it becomes unrecognizable.

The one minor positive to this pointless meandering is the amount of time (and the variety of different scenes) the movie manages to offer its performers. There’s not much cohesion to be found, but Boros delivers a bravely rankled, physically vulnerable performance, as a teenager in search of affection. Rahim contorts himself physically and emotionally, playing an addict desperately trying to fill a similar void. Farahani, meanwhile, tries to balance looming anxiety with utter exhaustion, until her character breaks under the pressure. However, the movie’s many hints at larger social fabrics — at the homophobia and sexism at the core of people’s fears, or the malformed subplot about the family’s North African roots and questions of assimilation — usually take the form of isolated scenes that, ironically, never blend in.

By the time Alpha lays its cards on the table, it reveals a truly mystifying storytelling approach in retrospect, one that can’t even be labelled an admirable failure. Where the film begins and where it ends up may as well be on different planets, and the space between them is seldom tread with the artistic deftness required to connect so many disparate ideas. The result is a work of heavy, flashy textures, but textures alone — and textures that never seem to fully justify their own existence. Ducournau’s strengths tend to lie in engaging with challenging material, but her latest simply plants the seeds for difficult ideas, only to watch them perish from too great a distance to intervene.

Siddhant Adlakha (@SiddhantAdlakha)is a New York-based film critic and video essay writer originally from Mumbai. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety. the Guardian, and New York Magazine.