By Michael Marano

AIDS made us strangers in our own lives. It took our world and made it foreign, putting us in the same socio‑cultural no‑man’s‑land where Alpha’s immigrant family is struggling.

Alpha, directed by Julia Ducournau. Screening in Boston at AMC Boston Common 19, AMC Causeway 13, AMC South Bay Center, AMC Assembly Row, AMC Braintree, and Landmark Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge.

A scene from Alpha. Photo: courtesy of Mandarin & Compagnie Kallouche Cinema Frakas Productions France 3 Cinema

Julia Ducournau’s previous film, Titane (Arts Fuse review), was a Palme d’Or-winning body horror epic, a cinematic conversation with David Cronenberg’s Crash that explores our too‑mortal flesh’s relationship to the internal‑combustion idols central to our consumerist reality. Her new film, Alpha, is an AIDS allegory, a cinematic conversation with David Cronenberg’s The Fly. But instead of Jeff Goldblum, trapped between human and insect, in Alpha we have a Berber family in France caught between immigration and assimilation as a bloodborne illness restructures society around them.

As the credits rolled the first time I saw Alpha, I said to myself, “What the Hell was that?!”

Five minutes later the full weight of it hit me like a dropped cinderblock.

The second time I saw it, I bawled my eyes out.

Alpha is a fucking masterpiece.

I haven’t had this dramatic an initial “What the Hell was that?!”‑to‑“This is a masterpiece” reaction since David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. And, like Fire Walk With Me, Alpha deals with a teenage girl caught in a fracturing reality and facing a possible demon that is a family curse.

Mélissa Boros plays the titular Alpha, a 13‑year‑old who passes out at a party and discovers that someone, without her consent, has tattooed a letter “A” on her arm with a possibly dirty needle. Her mom, a doctor played by Golshifteh Farahani, freaks the hell out that Alpha might be exposed to “the virus,” a new disease that turns people to marble — they eventually crumble into red dust. Into this apocalyptic mix enters Alpha’s walking‑corpse of an Uncle Amin (an incredible Tahar Rahim), whom Alpha doesn’t quite remember. Or does she?

Red dust serves as a defining image in Alpha. In this story about a North African family coming to the West, the image is used in a way that inverts the orientalist, romantic depictions of red dust in the writings of Paul Bowles and his ilk. Just as William S. Burroughs went to North Africa to be a junkie, Uncle Amin left North Africa to be a junkie.

The fragile reality of the immigrant family is at the center of Alpha. Alpha’s mom is a doctor, but she’s not fully integrated into French society. Alpha isn’t a child or an adult. Amin isn’t fully dead or alive. The virus might be what Alpha’s Berber grandma sees as a North African demon, a spirit she calls “The Red Wind.” The disease melts all the solidity in their lives. Time itself becomes liquid. For those of us who remember the nightmarish early days of AIDS, Alpha is a PTSD trigger. (The film is set mostly in an alternate late‑1980s/early‑1990s.)

AIDS made us strangers in our own lives. It took our world and made it foreign, putting us in the same socio‑cultural no‑man’s‑land where Alpha’s immigrant family is struggling. Alpha might be thought of as a French take on Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. An unreal virus rewrites and corrupts reality and society just as surely as it rewrites and corrupts the body.

Poe’s poem “A Dream Within a Dream” is the thematic backbone of Alpha. The poem is taught in Alpha’s English class and is later connected with “The Masque of the Red Death,” which is staged in miniature in a Toten Tanz–like rave of infected people. Poe’s description of being unable to hold grains of sand takes on brutally real weight in a film where loved ones are literally cracking to dust. This embrace of a dream‑like reality creates a dream‑like derailment of cause and effect in the narrative, with characters meeting and passing their younger selves. (The fact that about half of this movie takes place during Ramadan can’t be an accident.) On top of that, Alpha is set during the tortuous time that it takes weeks to get results for tests for “the virus.” Alpha is caught in that horrible twilight of waiting, in a world in which time itself has become warped.

Alpha presents horrible, apocalyptic images of marginalized people, exiles in their own culture, dying in understaffed wards, desperate to find help at shuttered hospitals. They are, to quote Paddy Chayefsky’s The Hospital, “forgotten to death. Unseen to death. Dismissed to death.” Kind of like how Jonathan Larson, author of the AIDS‑centric musical Rent, died during the period in which Alpha is set.

Within this realm of the invisible, the unseen see each other. There are revealing scenes in clinic waiting rooms. Those touched by “the virus” recognize each other in ways others won’t — or refuse to, or can’t. At one point, Alpha, caretaker with her mom for her junkie uncle, sees the anguish in the eyes of another caretaker who has lost their loved one. It’s unbearable.

There’s a striking scene in Alpha when Alpha, a school pariah because she is suspected of carrying “the virus,” cracks her head and bleeds in a pool during swim class. What follows is a masterful sequence that cinematically quotes Carrie, Let the Right One In, and even Jaws.

Early in the film, Alpha says to her mom that she still takes a step back on the threshold when she comes home, a reflexive memory of how she’d stand when her beloved, long‑dead dog would run up and jump to greet her. Her mom says, “Why would you want to forget that?” This is the trauma that Alpha is addressing: even in the face of loss, and the absence of those you love, why would you want to forget?

This is Julia Ducournau’s plague‑ridden, diseased, apocalyptic Amarcord. It is memory. It is elegy. It is a requiem. It is a fulfilled obligation to remember horrible times through an unreal prism, just as Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau (or The Secret Agent) is a fulfilled obligation to remember horrible times through an unreal prism.

How Alpha affected me was to remind me of my obligation to remember, and the pain of that was summoned by Ducournau’s savage artistry.

Back in the 1980s, author, critic, writing instructor and personal trainer Michael Marano was hanging out very late at night with a bunch of his gay friends at a Howard Johnson’s, who told a bunch of jaw-droppingly tasteless AIDS jokes. “You guys are all being careful, right?” he asked. They assured him they were. Marano is the only person seated at that table who is still alive.