Palme d'Or winner Julia Ducournau (Raw, Titane) returns with her third feature, the genre-bending Alpha which gets a new trailer today from Curzon Film ahead of its theatrical release in the UK on November 14, and a release in the US this month via NEON.
Starring Mélissa Boros, Tahar Rahim (The Serpent, The Mauritanian), Golshifteh Farahani (The Patience Stone, Extraction) and Emma Mackey (Sex Education, Emma), Alpha follows the titular, troubled 13-year-old who lives with her single mom whose world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm while a mysterious virus is plaguing society. Billed as Ducournau's most personal film yet, Alpha is influenced by the director's experience growing up during the AIDS epidemic of the '80s and '90s:
ALPHA wants to get under your skin, viscerally recreating the social panic and paranoia that spreads during a pandemic and the irrational stigma that can attach to illness. But more than that, it is about trauma and memory and the complex relationship between the sensing body and the thinking mind. How do we react when our close personal and familial relationships are disrupted by more primal reactions to addiction and illness. How do we process the unthinking mechanics of our biology or the indifferent progress of a virus when it causes damage to the ones we love.
Following its World Premiere at Cannes earlier this year, Alpha has played at Sitges Film Festival, the BFI London Film Festival, with an upcoming screening at the UK's Celluloid Screams in Sheffield.
Check out the new official UK trailer for Alpha below:
