Red Wind

"Alpha" by Julia Ducournau

Mar 19, 2026

Close up of a punctured forearm, the muted opening bars of Portishead’s Roads. A child’s hand connects needle marks with a Sharpie, turning them into constellations. The camera travels down the arm, the hand opens. A ladybug lifts off to the bespectacled wonder of a 5-year-old girl. The arm belongs to Uncle Amir, emaciated, grinning, dangerous. Tenderness and damage share the same illicit space.

It is unthinkable of such a scene in an American movie. I saw Alpha at IFC Center on Monday. After the screening, the French director Julia Ducournau corrected the interviewer several times. Each question tried to arrange the film into palatable meaning. She wanted none of it.

Back to the movie: Years later, still in the 80s, in an unnamed coastal town, now teenage Alpha (Mélissa Boros, a revelation) comes home from a party with a DIY tattoo. Her mother, a fierce doctor, played by Golshifteh Farahani, fears she contracted the bloodborne virus that turns bodies into marbled statues. Her brother, Alpha’s Uncle Amir (Tahar Rahim, broken and seductive), from the opening scene reappears and stays with them to get clean. He’s in perpetual withdrawal, pulled back by a sister who won’t let him go. At a reunion of the extended Berber family, generations may not speak the same tongue, but food, love, and dance ties them together. The Berber grandmother names what’s driving Amir: the Red Wind. She means something older and more elusive than addiction or infection. It also describes the Siorcco, a hot wind that carries red sand from the Sahara to Europe.

The apartment tightens. Alpha’s blood test comes back negative. But the mother retests her blood, mixes it with her own. Alpha bleeds into the school pool. Her classmates avoid her. Amir sleeps on the floor of Alpha’s room, convulsing in withdrawal. She kept her distance when he first returned, repulsed. Now she holds him through the spasms until the trembling passes.

Then Amir takes her to a club. Alpha, oversized glasses, bare-faced, folds into a transgressive adult space. The air is dark and thick. Uncle and niece dance together, charged, almost weightless.

Just like in Ducurnau’s 2021 Cannes-winner, Titane, some of the most emotionally charged moments are when people are dancing. In Alpha the body is in full possession of itself and yet, completely detached. Movement expresses what language and plot can’t. It’s like a plot point which the body feels before the mind catches up.

I recognize that space so well. As a teenager, I used dance to assert presence without explanation. In the clubs of Munich, my best friend and I didn’t dance for boys. We danced as a raison d’être. There was always a bottle of Diet Coke somewhere. It was ecstasy, purity, joy, and rage embodied in space.

Alpha still dances after Amir disappears to score drugs, the rhythm briefly absorbs his absence. Later, when she walks alone to a classmate’s house, kisses him, undresses. She’s ready for her first time, until she sees the same tattoo inked onto his arm.

The structure loops, images echo, and time is porous. Memory travels through repetition. The logic of trauma and longing don’t obey chronology.

The Red Wind is the film’s real organizing principle. The grandmother’s word for Amir’s affliction metastasizes outward: into the bloodborne panic, the mother’s compulsive testing, the school’s hysteria, Alpha’s own adolescent body in transformation. Whatever moves through bodies and cannot be stopped by quarantine or verdict. Love. Damage. Contagion. Red Wind passes between family who are bound to each other whether they chose it or not. Ducournau offers no interpretation.

Critics panned the film last year after the Cannes premiere, searching for clear conclusions: AIDS allegory, coming-of-age, or trauma. Alpha keeps opening narrative possibilities instead of closing thoughts. Fluidity as narrative architecture.

I left the theatre rattled and deeply moved. The film kept working inside me on the subway home and days later. Rahim’s body close to collapse. Boros, dancing alone. The water clouding the the pool crimson. The Red Wind, swirling.