CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 3-27-26

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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, March 27th, 2026.

1) THEY WILL KILL YOU

I had a serious case of déjà vu watching They Will Kill You. And not the good kind, it's the kind where you feel like you’ve already sat through this exact same movie a week ago, only maybe with slightly different actors and slightly different wallpaper.

Because, yeah, I did just sit through something like this: Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. And now here comes another one, another “woman trapped, hunted, fighting for her life against a bunch of rich psychos” movie. Only this time we throw in a satanic cult, some immortality, and even more blood.

And guess what? This one’s just as bad.

The setup is familiar, and not in a comforting way. Zazie Beetz plays Asia, an ex-con trying to rebuild her life after a brutal upbringing that includes an abusive father and a traumatic childhood incident that lands her in prison.

When she gets out, she takes a job as a live-in housekeeper at this mysterious New York high-rise called The Virgil. Of course, the place is crawling with secrets: people have disappeared, nobody asks questions, and it turns out the tenants are part of a satanic cult that plans to use her as a human sacrifice.

Oh, and they’re basically immortal. So when she fights back (and she does, with flaming axes, swords, guns, whatever she can get her hands on) they just keep coming.

And that’s the movie. One long, loud, repetitive series of fight scenes where limbs get chopped off, heads get blown apart, blood sprays everywhere, and then…everyone comes back.

Or their eyeballs crawl across the floor. Or their body parts reassemble themselves. Or whatever the hell the movie thinks is going to be outrageous in the moment.

Here’s the problem: none of it is.

This is a movie that is so aggressively derivative, so shamelessly stitched together from other, better movies, that there’s not a single moment that feels fresh. Not one. It’s like a highlight reel of influences, except it’s the worst possible version of those influences.

You can see the fingerprints of Quentin Tarantino all over this thing (especially Kill Bill) from the chapter headings to the splatter to the revenge structure. But Tarantino was already riffing on older Asian cinema, so what you’ve got here is basically a copy of a copy of a copy. It’s cinematic Xerox.

Then you’ve got Sam Raimi in there, his Evil Dead stuff, especially in the way the camera moves and the grotesque, over-the-top gore is played for laughs. Except Raimi knows how to stage chaos. He knows rhythm. This movie just flails around. There’s no control, no timing, no sense of when to push or pull back.

There are bits that feel like they’re ripped straight out of Park Chan-wook, particularly Oldboy. There’s some Timur Bekmambetov-style nonsense, like Wanted, Night Watch, that kind of hyperactive visual chaos.

You even get flashes of stuff that looks like Bad Times at the El Royale, Hotel Artemis, even Vacancy. It’s just a blender of other movies, and none of it gels.

And it’s loud. My God, is it loud. Wall-to-wall needle drops (hip-hop, rock, whatever they can throw in there to make it feel “cool”), but it all feels forced. Like it’s desperately trying to get a reaction from an audience that it doesn’t trust to be engaged otherwise.

It’s the kind of movie that feels designed for a drunk midnight crowd to hoot and cheer when someone’s head explodes. The problem is, when I saw it, the audience was mostly quiet. Because there’s nothing to latch onto.

Now, Zazie Beetz, she’s the one saving grace here. She’s a terrific actress. I’ve loved her since Atlanta, and she’s got a presence that’s just naturally compelling. Even here, saddled with a completely one-dimensional character that’s basically a mash-up of every revenge heroine you’ve seen in the last 30 years, she holds your attention.

She commits physically, she sells the action as best she can, and she gives the movie whatever little life it has.

But she’s stuck in a script that gives her nothing. No depth, no originality, no real arc beyond “fight, fight, fight, survive.”

And the supporting cast? Completely wasted. Patricia Arquette shows up as the head of this cult with a bizarre, inconsistent Irish accent that seems to change from scene to scene.

Heather Graham (who it’s nice to see, by the way) is reduced to running around as a decapitated body or a crawling eyeball or whatever grotesque gag the movie needs in that moment. Tom Felton and the rest of the cast are just there to be slaughtered repeatedly.

And it goes on. And on. And on.

It’s exhausting. Not in a thrilling way, but in a “please, can this just end already?” way. The action scenes aren’t inventive, they’re just repetitive. The humor doesn’t land. The horror elements don’t work. The satanic stuff is half-baked at best.

And when the movie finally gets to whatever passes for a climax, it just throws more noise and more blood at you and hopes something sticks. Nothing does.

This is the second week in a row I’ve had to sit through one of these “woman fights through waves of enemies in a hyper-stylized bloodbath” movies, and this one is just as bad—maybe worse because it thinks it’s being clever. It isn’t. It’s just loud, sloppy, and completely devoid of originality.

They Will Kill You won’t kill you, but it will absolutely bore you. And it’ll make you wish you were watching literally any of the movies it’s ripping off instead. - ⭐️

2) THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST

There is no question that The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is about a subject that is not only relevant, but absolutely essential right now.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It’s dominating the news, it’s reshaping industries, it’s creeping into our everyday lives whether we like it or not, and it’s going to have massive implications for the future: good, bad, and everything in between.

So on paper, this is exactly the kind of documentary that should exist.

Directed by Daniel Roher (who made the Oscar-winning Navalny) along with Charlie Tyrell (which is ironic and funny, considering that the ficitional entity that manufactures the evil replicants in Blade Runner is called The Tyrell Corporation) the film is framed through Roher’s personal perspective as he prepares to become a father.

His wife is pregnant, he’s anxious about the world his child is about to be born into, and he decides to investigate artificial intelligence: what it is, what it might become, and whether we’re heading toward salvation or disaster.

That’s where the term “apocaloptimist” comes in, it's the idea that we’re simultaneously staring down a possible apocalypse while also hoping technology might save us. It's a good hook.

Unfortunately, good intentions don’t automatically make for a good movie. And that’s the big problem here. Because structurally, this documentary is kind of a mess.

One of the first (and biggest) mistakes the film makes is centering itself so heavily on Roher. The movie is told almost entirely through his perspective, his anxiety, his personal life, his journal entries, his sketches, his thoughts about becoming a father. We see home videos, ultrasound visits, conversations with his wife, and a constant stream of self-reflection about how scared he is of AI.

And I’ve got to be honest: it gets old fast.

This is something that’s always bothered me about certain documentaries, how filmmakers insist on inserting themselves into the story when they don’t need to be there.

Michael Moore has made a career out of it, often bending reality in the process, and there are shades of that here. Roher positions himself as the emotional center of the film, as if his anxiety is just as important as the actual subject matter.

It isn’t.

Because the real story here (the one that’s actually fascinating) is artificial intelligence itself. And to the film’s credit, it does feature an incredibly impressive lineup of interview subjects.

We’re talking about major players in the AI world: Sam Altman from OpenAI, people from Anthropic, researchers, ethicists, critics, thinkers, advocates. There are smart people in this movie saying genuinely interesting things about how AI works, where it came from, what it might become, and what the risks are.

Those moments are easily the best part of the film.

When the documentary steps back and lets these people talk (when it actually focuses on the history of AI, how it learns, how it evolves, what it might do in the future) it becomes reasonably compelling. But those moments are constantly interrupted.

Interrupted by animation. Interrupted by Roher’s personal musings. Interrupted by these “wacky” visual flourishes, like hand-drawn sketches coming to life, anxiety represented as literal animated mountains, stylized recreations of conversations with his wife, puppetry, fantasy sequences.

It’s busy. It’s distracting. And it feels unnecessary.

Instead of digging deeper into the subject, the film keeps cutting away to the filmmaker reacting to the subject. And that’s frustrating, because there’s a lot here that could have been explored in much greater detail.

The documentary touches on important issues, like the potential for AI to revolutionize medicine, to cure diseases, to improve quality of life. It also addresses the darker side: misinformation, job loss, weaponization, even the possibility of AI surpassing human intelligence in ways we can’t control.

But it rarely goes beyond surface-level discussion.

Everything is presented in quick bursts (almost like bullet points) rather than in-depth exploration. You get a taste of an idea, and then the movie moves on. Or worse, it cuts back to Roher sitting in his specially designed room, rubbing his forehead, talking about how anxious he is.

That room, by the way, becomes a central visual motif. It’s a space he designed (with the help of AI, of course) where he conducts interviews and reflects on his thoughts. It’s a clever idea in theory, but in practice it just becomes another reminder that the film is more interested in him than in the subject.

There’s also a noticeable manipulation in the way the interviews are presented. It’s pretty clear that some of the conversations have been edited in a way that inserts Roher into exchanges that didn’t happen exactly as we’re seeing them.

Reaction shots, added voiceover questions, intercut footage, and it all gives the impression of a more direct interaction than likely occurred. And that kind of thing undermines the credibility of a documentary.

Now, to be fair, there are moments that work. Some of the experts offer genuinely insightful commentary. There are a few exchanges that stick with you. The contrast between the “doomers” who believe AI could lead to extinction and the “optimists” who think it could solve humanity’s greatest problems is interesting.

But even that structure, this idea of moving from fear to hope and then settling somewhere in the middle, feels a little too neat.

The film opens with archival footage of Arthur C. Clarke talking about artificial intelligence decades ago, and that’s actually one of the more effective touches. It reminds you that this anxiety isn’t new. We’ve been worried about machines taking over for a long time.

What’s new is how fast everything is happening. And that’s what I wish the movie had focused on more.

Instead of spending so much time on Roher’s personal journey, his anxiety about fatherhood, and all the stylistic distractions, I would have much preferred a deeper dive into the actual issues.

Talk more about how AI affects working-class people. Talk about access, cost, inequality. Who benefits? Who gets left behind? Those questions are touched on, but never really explored.

And for a documentary about something this important, that feels like a missed opportunity.

If you already know a bit about AI (if you’ve read about it, used it, followed the news) you’re probably not going to learn much here that you didn’t already know.

The film doesn’t uncover anything particularly new, and it doesn’t go deep enough into the material to offer real insight beyond what’s already out there.

So what you’re left with is a well-intentioned documentary with an important subject, an impressive list of interviewees, and a handful of interesting moments… Buried under a self-indulgent structure that constantly gets in its own way.

Less of the filmmaker, less of the wacky animation, and more focus on the actual topic could have made this a really strong documentary.

As it is, it’s frustrating, occasionally interesting, but ultimately disappointing. And not something I can recommend. - ⭐️⭐️

3) MARC BY SOFIA

I went into Marc by Sofia with a lot of anticipation, and honestly, a little bit of curiosity about how this was even going to work. Sofia Coppola making her first documentary? About Marc Jacobs? Okay, that’s intriguing right there. This is a filmmaker whose voice is unmistakable.

You know a Sofia Coppola movie within five minutes, whether it’s The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, The Bling Ring, or Priscilla. She’s got a style, a rhythm, a mood, and it’s hers. Completely hers.

So the idea of her applying that sensibility to nonfiction, especially about someone she knows this well, sounded like a great idea.

And it turns out, it is.

Now, the movie itself doesn’t follow the usual documentary playbook. If you’re expecting a standard cradle-to-runway biography with a bunch of talking heads explaining how brilliant Marc Jacobs is, you’re not going to get that.

This is much more personal, much more impressionistic. It’s structured around roughly twelve weeks leading up to one of his big runway shows in New York, but it jumps around—through archival footage, through memories, through conversations. It’s loose, it’s fluid, it’s kind of all over the place in the best way.

And I’ve got to say this right up front: I am not a fashion guy. Not even a little bit. I’ve spent most of my life in jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps.

I don’t watch runway shows, I don’t follow designers, I don’t care about trends. I can appreciate something that looks great, sure (I’m not blind) but the world of fashion has never been my world.

And yet…this movie pulled me in.

That’s really the key to why it works. Because it’s not just about fashion. It’s about creation. It’s about pressure. It’s about what it’s like to make something and put it out into the world and then deal with whatever comes after that.

And that’s something Coppola understands intimately, and it’s something she captures beautifully here.

Marc Jacobs himself is fascinating to watch. He’s funny, he’s obsessive, he’s meticulous to a degree that’s almost insane, and you get to see that process up close: choosing fabrics, tweaking designs, obsessing over details that most people would never even notice.

There’s a sequence where he’s discussing makeup choices (like “dead Barbie” aesthetics) and it sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but when you watch him work through it, you realize this is how artists think. This is how they build worlds.

And Coppola shoots it like an art film. This doesn’t feel like a documentary in the traditional sense, it feels like one of her narrative films, just with real people. The way it moves, the way it lingers, the way it lets moments breathe, it’s very much her.

You get these quiet, observational scenes, mixed with archival footage that jumps you back decades into Jacobs’ career, his early breakthroughs, the grunge collection, his time at Louis Vuitton. It’s not linear, it’s not neat, but it’s engaging.

What really stands out, though, is the relationship between Coppola and Jacobs. You feel that history. You feel that friendship. These aren’t stiff, formal interviews, these are conversations.

Sometimes funny, sometimes revealing, sometimes just two people who’ve known each other for decades talking about work, life, and everything in between. It gives the movie a warmth that you don’t usually get in documentaries like this.

And then there’s something else the movie captures really well, something that I think a lot of films about artists don’t quite nail: what happens after the work is done.

There’s this great concept Jacobs talks about—“post-art-um,” that crash after you’ve created something big and put it out into the world. The exhaustion, the emptiness, the need to recover. Coppola really leans into that, and it’s some of the most interesting material in the film.

Now, is it perfect? No. It does start a little slowly, and there are moments where it feels a bit…insular. A little too “inside baseball” for people who don’t follow fashion at all.

You can tell these are two people who live in a very specific world, and sometimes it has that “too cool for school” vibe that might turn some viewers off. But for me, it didn’t matter.

Because at the end of the day, this is a movie about creativity, about friendship, and about what it takes to make art and survive the process. And even if you don’t care about fashion (and I don’t) it’s still compelling.

So I was pleasantly surprised. More than that, I was impressed. Sofia Coppola didn’t just dip her toe into documentary filmmaking; she made something that feels completely in line with everything she’s done before, while also being its own thing.

And that’s not easy to do.

Marc by Sofia is unusual, a little messy, very personal, and ultimately pretty wonderful. Another strong piece of work from a filmmaker who just keeps proving how distinctive her voice really is. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️

4) FORBIDDEN FRUITS

There’s a very specific kind of movie that drives me a little crazy, and Forbidden Fruits is a perfect example of it.

It’s the kind of movie where you sit there for the first hour thinking, “This is borderline unwatchable…this is a mess…this is derivative, lazy, not funny, not scary, not interesting,” and then (out of nowhere) the last 35 or 40 minutes kick in, something resembling a pulse appears, and you go, “Well…okay…there’s something here.”

Not enough to save it. But enough to make you annoyed that the whole thing couldn’t have been that.

So yeah, Forbidden Fruits, directed by Meredith Alloway and co-written with Lily Houghton (based on Houghton’s play with the very subtle title Of the Women Came the Beginning of Sin, and Through Her We All Die), is a comedy-horror mashup set almost entirely inside a Texas mall.

That's never a great idea, by the way, because if you’re going to set a horror movie in a mall, congratulations, you are immediately inviting comparisons to Dawn of the Dead, and you are going to lose that battle every single time.

The setup is simple, and on paper, it sounds like it could work. You’ve got this clique of retail workers at a boutique called Free Eden (Apple, Cherry, and Fig) who present themselves as this tight-knit, “girl boss,” hyper-feminine sisterhood, but underneath it’s all manipulation, control, insecurity, and toxicity.

After hours, they run this sort of half-baked witchy cult in the basement, with rituals, confessions, invocations of Marilyn Monroe, weird concoctions, rules about boys, all that stuff.

Then along comes Pumpkin, the new hire (literally brought into the group because her name fits the theme) which is about as subtle as everything else in this movie. And her presence starts to fracture the group, expose the cracks, bring up past trauma, and eventually push everything toward a big, bloody meltdown.

That’s the idea. The problem is, for about an hour, none of it works.

The screenplay is a mess. And I mean a mess. It is so clearly cobbled together from better movies that it becomes distracting. You’ve got The Craft in there (obviously) teen girls, coven, power dynamics, but without any of the weight or emotional grounding that made that movie work.

You’ve got Mean Girls in there, but stripped of any wit, any bite, any actual understanding of how teenage dynamics function. The insults feel like they were pulled from a rejected first draft. There’s no sharpness, no comedic timing, no insight.

And then you’ve got this weird, half-hearted attempt to crib themes from Barbie, and I’m not kidding. There’s this whole thread about femininity, empowerment, patriarchy, women supporting women…except it’s handled in the most surface-level, on-the-nose, “we didn’t quite get the rights so here’s a knockoff version” way imaginable.

There’s literally a stand-in doll that’s basically Not-Barbie, and you can feel the movie desperately trying to say something meaningful about womanhood and identity. But the characters are so one-dimensional, so thinly written, that none of it lands.

Apple is the queen bee. Cherry is the approval-seeking ditz. Fig is the goth intellectual. Pumpkin is the outsider. That’s it. That’s as far as it goes for a long, long stretch. They’re not people, they’re sketches. Honestly, the dolls in Barbie had more depth than these characters do for most of this movie.

The witchcraft angle? Completely undercooked. It feels like an afterthought. They say they’re a coven, they do these rituals, they whisper to Marilyn Monroe like she’s a deity, they drink weird stuff out of a cowboy boot, and none of it has any real sense of danger or mystery or, frankly, purpose.

In The Craft, the supernatural elements were essential, they were tied directly to the girls’ trauma, their desires, their need for control. Here, it just feels like cosplay.

There’s also this subplot involving a former member named Pickle, played by Emma Chamberlain, who’s now this unstable, dangerous figure, and the way her backstory is revealed (through a clunky, awkward, and long flashback) is just…bad. Jarring, poorly integrated, dramatically ineffective.

And the satire? Forget it. The movie wants to comment on consumerism, mall culture, materialism, performative femininity, Bible allegory, and it gestures at all of it and says absolutely nothing.

If you’re going to tackle that stuff in a mall setting, again, you’re stepping into territory that Dawn of the Dead absolutely owned decades ago. This movie doesn’t even come close.

So yeah, for about an hour, this thing is a chore. Flat jokes, dead pacing, recycled ideas, no emotional investment. But (and this is where it gets frustrating) there are things here that work. First and foremost, the cast.

These actresses are doing work. They are putting in way more energy, way more commitment, way more personality than this script deserves. Lili Reinhart is very solid as Apple, Lola Tung has some nice moments as Pumpkin, Alexandra Shipp brings something to Fig that isn’t really on the page.

But the standout (the reason this movie is even remotely watchable) is Victoria Pedretti as Cherry. She is terrific in this.

And I don’t use that lightly. This is one of those performances where an actor just bulldozes past the limitations of the material and creates something real.

For the first chunk of the movie, yeah, she feels like she’s channeling that Amanda Seyfried-in-Mean Girls energy—kind of ditzy, kind of goofy, playing the “bimbo” role.

But as the movie goes on, especially in that last stretch, she just takes over.

There’s a confessional scene in this Marilyn Monroe dressing room (this weird, surreal space where the girls “confess their sins”) and Pedretti gets this long monologue, and it’s incredible. It shouldn’t be, because the writing itself isn’t particularly deep or sophisticated, but she commits to it completely. She’s funny, she’s vulnerable, she’s a little unhinged, she’s completely present.

It’s the kind of performance that makes you wish the entire movie had been built around her.

And then, finally, the movie wakes up.

The last 40 minutes (when a massive Texas tornado traps everyone inside the mall and all the tensions boil over) that’s when it actually becomes entertaining. It leans into the horror, into the absurdity, into the chaos, and suddenly you’ve got momentum.

There’s a fantastic, gruesome, genuinely fun kill involving an escalator, which is the kind of thing where you sit up and go, “Okay, now we’re talking.” There’s broken glass, fights in the mall, heightened emotion, big swings.

Lili Reinhart gets a really strong monologue where Apple just unloads (confession, rage, vulnerability) and it’s one of the few moments where the character actually feels like a person. And everything just clicks…briefly.

It builds to a climax that’s bloody, ridiculous, and entertaining in a way the rest of the movie should have been.

And then you get this weird post-credits reveal involving Gabrielle Union’s character (who’s mostly a voice throughout the film) that hints at something bigger, maybe even a sequel, which…no. No, we don’t need that.

So where does that leave Forbidden Fruits?

It’s a frustrating movie. A deeply flawed, mostly unsuccessful satire with a terrible script, weak direction, and about an hour of material that is, honestly, hard to sit through.

But it’s also got a cast (especially Victoria Pedretti) doing genuinely impressive work, and a final act that delivers some real, trashy, gory fun.

I can’t recommend it. I just can’t. The bad outweighs the good by a pretty wide margin. But man…if that last 40 minutes had been the whole movie?

We’d be having a very different conversation. - ⭐️⭐️

5) ALPHA

There are filmmakers who come out of the gate interesting, maybe even promising, and then there are filmmakers like Julia Ducournau, who, three movies in, have already carved out a voice so distinct, so fearless, so unapologetically their own that you either get on board or you don’t... and if you don’t, that’s kind of your problem.

Because this is not a filmmaker who is going to meet you halfway.

Ducournau’s first film, Raw, knocked me flat. It is a coming-of-age story filtered through cannibalism that was as emotionally raw (no pun intended…okay, maybe a little intended) as it was shocking.

Then she follows it up with Titane, which I still think is one of the best films of the last 25 years, it's a deeply weird, wildly emotional, body horror masterpiece about identity, sexuality, parenthood, grief…all wrapped in something that felt like Cronenberg by way of a fever dream and yet completely her own.

So now we get Alpha, her third film, and yeah, I’ve seen the reactions. Mixed at best, hostile at worst. People calling it repetitive, or simplistic, or slow, or saying it doesn’t have enough ideas, which is insane to me, because I had almost the exact opposite reaction.

I think Alpha is an extraordinarily moving, deeply unsettling, challenging, and, yeah, beautiful piece of work.

Now, on the surface (and I do mean on the surface) it’s about a 13-year-old girl named Alpha, living in a coastal French city, who comes home from a party with a stick-and-poke tattoo and suddenly becomes the center of fear and paranoia because there’s this mysterious blood-borne disease going around that literally turns people into marble…into dust…into these crumbling statues of what they used to be.

Her mother is a doctor treating patients with this disease, her uncle Amin is a heroin addict who moves in with them, and the film toggles between timelines (Alpha at 13, Alpha at 5) while everything slowly collapses into something much more abstract, much more emotional, much more…dreamlike.

And yes, the AIDS allegory is there. It’s not subtle. It’s not supposed to be. Blood, stigma, fear of contamination, social ostracization, people being treated like walking corpses—it’s all baked into the DNA of this movie. But if you reduce Alpha to just that, you’re missing the point entirely.

Because this isn’t really a movie about a disease.

It’s a movie about trauma. Family trauma. The kind that doesn’t go away. The kind that sits in your bones, in your memory, in your dreams, and just…stays there.

And Ducournau doesn’t tell this story in a clean, linear, point-A-to-point-B way. Not even close. This thing jumps timelines, slips into fantasy, drifts into nightmare logic, and by the time you’re deep into the final stretch, it becomes less about “what is literally happening” and more about “what does this feel like.”

You have to let it wash over you. If you try to map it out like a plot diagram, you’re going to be frustrated. But if you surrender to it? It’s kind of overwhelming, and glorious.

The performances across the board are terrific. Mélissa Boros, as Alpha, carries this thing with a kind of raw vulnerability that feels completely authentic, as you’re watching a kid trying to process sexuality, fear, shame, and this looming sense of doom, all while being bullied, isolated, and basically treated like she’s already dead.

Golshifteh Farahani, as the mother, is extraordinary, playing both protector and, in many ways, the source of a different kind of trauma. She’s a doctor on the front lines of this plague, but she’s also a mother who cannot let go, who cannot accept, who is absolutely suffocating in her need to control fate.

And then there’s Tahar Rahim as Amin, the uncle, and this is where the movie really starts to dig in. He’s a junkie, he’s dying, he’s symbolic from the get-go, but as the film progresses, he becomes something else entirely. He becomes memory. He becomes guilt. He becomes a ghost that refuses to leave.

And that’s really what this movie is about: the refusal to let go.

There’s an early moment that just wrecked me when I thought about it later, it is the image of young Alpha, at five years old, connecting the track marks on her uncle’s arm with a marker, turning them into something almost artistic, like a map.

And he says, “I caught something,” and opens his hand, and there’s a ladybug. This beautiful, innocent moment. Except…we know what he actually “caught.”

And that’s the movie in a nutshell. Memory versus reality. The stories we tell ourselves to survive versus the truth that haunts us.

Visually, this thing is incredible. The body horror elements (the bleeding, the transformation into dust, the hospital sequences filled with these crumbling, fragile bodies) are deeply unsettling without ever feeling cheap.

There’s a mood here, a dread, that just hangs over everything. The cinematography shifts depending on the timeline—warmer, more saturated tones in the past, colder, more oppressive imagery in the present and in the more surreal sequences.

And then there are moments that just go full nightmare.

There’s a scene where Alpha is in bed and the ceiling literally begins to collapse down onto her, closing in, suffocating her, and it works as pure horror, like straight-up anxiety nightmare fuel, but also as metaphor. The weight of everything (family, illness, memory) pressing down until you can’t breathe.

The film also weaves in these smaller threads that echo the larger themes. The English teacher, quietly living his life while his partner is dying from the disease, being judged, being watched. The Scarlet Letter imagery with the “A” tattoo, yeah, it’s obvious, but it’s effective.

The Edgar Allan Poe references, the idea of a “dream within a dream,” which is basically the blueprint for how this whole thing is structured.

Because by the last 40 minutes, this movie is not interested in reality anymore. It becomes pure surrealism. Timelines blur, logic dissolves, and what you’re left with is emotion. Grief. Fear. Acceptance…or the inability to accept.

And that final stretch just crushed me.

The imagery of the red wind, the dust, the idea that what’s left of the dead is still in the air, still around us, still something we breathe in—that’s the movie. That’s the thesis. You don’t escape it. You don’t erase it. You just…learn to live with it. Or you don’t.

And the final moments, with that close-up, that realization, Beethoven's 7th Symphony playing, that quiet, devastating acceptance, and it got me. I was sitting there, just kind of wrecked.

Look, this is not an easy movie. It’s not going to hold your hand. It’s not going to explain itself. It’s messy, it’s nonlinear, it’s aggressive in the way it throws imagery and ideas at you.

But calling it empty? Calling it simplistic?

I don’t see that at all.

I see a filmmaker continuing to push herself, continuing to explore big, messy, uncomfortable ideas in a way that very few filmmakers working today are even attempting.

This is bold, personal, uncompromising filmmaking. And yeah, it’s divisive. It’s going to stay divisive.

But I’m firmly on the side that thinks Alpha is going to age really, really well. I think people are going to revisit this in a few years and go, “Oh…okay. There’s a lot more going on here than we gave it credit for.”

For me, this is three for three. Three great films from Ducournau.

And I cannot wait to see what she does next. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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