Mubi Monday: Alpha (2025)

Like many others, I have enjoyed the first two cinematic features from writer-director Julia Ducournau so much that I'm already willing to make time for anything she does. I was excited to check out Alpha, a film I had heard some good word on already. Sadly, this feels like a bit of a step down, and it's so frustratingly simplistic and heavy-handed that I wonder why she felt compelled to make it now. It feels decades too late, considering the main metaphor at the heart of it, but it also feels disappointingly half-baked.

Mélissa Boros is Alpha, a young girl living with her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani) in a dangerous world. Alpha's mother is also a nurse, helping many people who have succumbed to a disease that starts to turn their flesh into something resembling marble and their blood into red dust. Nobody wants to catch the disease, which is why many become afraid and harsh when Alpha gets a strange tattoo on her arm that looks as if it could keep bleeding, signifying that Alpha herself is infected. With many quick to react, Alpha finds herself bonding with her uncle, Amin (Tahar Rahim), a heroin addict who doesn't seem too bothered by the idea of accidentally overdosing one day.

The performances are all excellent. No complaints there. Young Boros makes a very capable lead, easily carrying the film on her slender shoulders through many scenes, and both Farahani and Rahim do well as two adults with very polar opposite attitudes to life and responsibility. Louai El Amrousy also does good work, although it's hard to enjoy his presence as his character acts out in ways that we've seen young men act out so many times before in this kind of situation (aka a potential sexual health situation they want to stay away from while blaming a young woman), and both Finnegan Oldfield and Emma Mackey are a welcome inclusion, the latter also being quite the pleasant surprise, considering the other things I have seen her in recently.

Considering what they have to work with here, everyone deserves even more credit than usual. Because this isn't great material. It's sombre and heavy-handed, but also doesn't feel as if it's handled in the best way possible by Ducournau. 

This may have been a very personal story for her, or she may have seen it as a metaphor applicable to many other issues we can see around us now on a daily basis, but that doesn't necessarily make it connect more with viewers. I might be very much in the minority here, but this felt like the cinematic equivalent of some elderly relative warning you about the dangers of unsafe sex after you've already spent years having your fun responsibly. It's a PSA about something that needed more people to take heed of it over 40 years ago. I'm not saying that STIs and AIDs have gone out of existence, but the information and resources are out there to avoid the kind of horrors we saw back when things were at their worst.

There are some other positives though. I enjoyed the music from Jim Williams. I also enjoyed the cinematography from Ruben Impens, and there are a few images here that will absolutely live in my memory far longer than anything else in the film. Maybe those images came to Ducournau first, leading her to create the film around them. She should have spent longer thinking about exactly how to couch everything, what points she could make most effectively, and how to justify what basically amounts to an all-too-minimal exploration of the AIDs crisis of the 1980s through a 21st century lens.

4/10

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Madame Web (2024)

This blog is a comfort for me. It helps me put my thoughts together, it contains a path of memories that can help me remember individual movies from the thousands I have watched, and it is sometimes the only thing that helps me endure a film that is mind-bogglingly abominable. As other people have already made clear, Madame Web is mind-bogglingly abominable. As the bad reviews started to pile up, I found myself wondering how bad it could be. It was even worse than I thought.

Okay, let me give a very quick plot summary, because anything more detailed would make me feel as if I did more work in writing this than anyone did on the script. Dakota Johnson is Cassie Webb, a woman who finds out that she has the gift of premonition. Initially assuming that she cannot change the future, a pigeon interfacing with her window helps her to realise that destiny is not set in stone. That puts her on a path to confront a powerful villain, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), a man who is determined to kill three young woman (played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor) he had foreseen being the cause of his own death. Emma Roberts is onscreen to play the mother of an un-named child people can figure out will be Peter Parker, Adam Scott is “uncle” Ben Parker, and the whole thing feels like a desperate attempt to profit from the Spider-Man universe without being able to feature Spider-Man in it.

Although it seems difficult to imagine anyone coming out of this well, it’s strange to see almost everyone sleepwalk through something so dire. The messy script, as inane as it is needlessly convoluted, was written by a whole load of people, including director S. J. Clarkson, and it never gathers any momentum. In fact, this is a film in which everyone feels as if they are wading through a pool of dark and thick molasses, either due to the direction or the cast being unable to work up any enthusiasm for it.

Johnson can do good work onscreen. That is not the case here. As bad as the film is, she matches it with a charmless lead performance. Sweeney, Merced, and O’Connor do a little better, although they get even less to work with (seriously, if you can tell me their names after the end credits, or even after any scene in which they have just been featured, then I will give you a chocolate treat). At least Scott and Roberts have enough presence to make their smaller roles feel like sips of water in a scorching desert. As for Rahim, it feels bad to blame someone for a performance that was so obviously reworked and redubbed when the plot was chopped and changed around, so I will just say that he needs to wipe this film from his C.V. and line up numerous future projects that can help us all quickly forget that he is in this.

Almost every main scene has at least one moment vying to be the worst moment of the film. I think a personal favourite of mine was Cassie being told “when you take on the responsibility, great power will come” (yes, really), but an entire book could be written detailing every flaw and misjudgement. If Clarkson has nothing else lined up yet, it may be some time until she gets to helm something of this scale. It may also be some time until she wants to ever try it again.

Memorable for all the wrong reasons, this is a new contender for the dubious honour of worst superhero movie of the 21st century. Someone should have seen that coming.

2/10

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A Prophet (2009)

Directed by Jacques Audiard (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Thomas Bidegain, based on the original incarnations of the tale by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit), A Prophet is an absolutely fantastic crime movie that mixes in some great characterisations with some Machiavellian moves, some moments of thoughtfulness with explosive violence and  equal amounts of hope and despair.

Tahar Rahim plays Malik El Djebana, a young Arab man who is sent to a French prison and tries to keep himself to himself. That doesn't last long, however, and once the head prisoner, Cesar (Niels Arestrup), asks him to do a job for him he is then dragged in to more and more schemes that involve him learning all about the criminal politics in and out of the prison. Malik watches and listens to everything and learns a hell of a lot, something that helps his self-preservation as the situation being created by Cesar and his underlings becomes increasingly dangerous.

It's a very traditional tale in many ways, the youngster who enters the criminal world and swiftly rises through the ranks while facing ever-increasing challenges and risks. What separates A Prophet from 101 other movies on the same subject is the way it nicely walks a line between something cinematic and something that feels very real. The other unique ingredient is the race of the lead character and how that feeds into the storyline, an essential factor in just how he can interact with certain groups and gain each foothold that he seeks.

The script is excellent and the direction from Jacques Audiard perfectly judged. Things move along at a brisk pace but there are tense scenes in which time slows right down, with every second vital as Malik weighs up his situation.

All of the cast do an excellent job. To honours go to Tahar Rahim but Niels Arestrup easily shares the top spot. Adel Bencherif, Jean-Philippe Ricci, and Slimane Dazi are also very good, along with absolutely everyone else who appears onscreen.

A Prophet is one of those movies that is actually quite hard to review in the blog format. I could either sum my feelings up for it in the first paragraph and leave it at that or I could explore every detail of the movie and create an essay going on for thousands of words but that's not the format for my blog so I'm going to settle for this middle ground with a review that I hope, as usual, gives enough information and "flavour" to people who may then check out the film and enjoy it for themselves.

9/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Prophet-Blu-ray/dp/B0036TGJX4/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1346794016&sr=8-3