JULIE SEBADELHA/AFP/Getty ImagesFor a certain type of adventurous filmgoer, Julia Ducournau is a household name. Her first feature, Raw (2016), was part of a nascent wave of female-focused body horror, using cannibalism as a metaphor for burgeoning sexuality and the pains of growing up. Her second film, Titane (2021), was one of the wildest Palme d’Or winners in Cannes history, taking the top prize at the world’s most prestigious film festival with a story about a woman who becomes pregnant with a human-machine hybrid after a passionate encounter with a sentient car. Ducournau’s latest, Alpha, also premiered at Cannes, where it baffled reviewers who expected another of the shocking, squirming body-horror movies that have become the director’s signature. Alpha is set in the ‘90s, and uses an imaginary disease that causes humans to slowly turn into stone as a metaphor for the paranoia and misinformation that were prevalent in the darkest days of the AIDS pandemic. Newcomer Mélissa Boros stars as the title character, a troubled 13-year-old who comes home from a party with a tattoo. This totally freaks out her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a physician who specializes in the film’s unnamed illness, which spreads in similar ways as HIV. The film is full of visceral moments, many of them involving Alpha’s uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim), an intravenous drug user who moves back in with Alpha and her mom to kick his habit. But it’s not a horror film, at least not according to its writer-director. Ducournau describes Alpha as a family drama first and a coming-of-age movie second, a film about unresolved trauma and how it can resonate throughout multiple generations of the same family. She spoke to Inverse in the weeks leading up to Alpha’s release in North American theaters, providing valuable insights into her framing of the film, the importance of knowing your limits as a director, and how the ‘90s were a “very dark age” in terms of empathy for marginalized sick people.This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.Alpha tells the story of a girl who gets a strange disease from a tattoo. | NEONThis is the first of your movies where I had to look away at times.That says a lot about you, I believe.Yeah, maybe. It’s the needle stuff.It's funny, because there are indeed a lot of needles [in the film], but you never actually see the act of injecting up close. I imposed a certain discipline on myself as far as needles were concerned, for many reasons. But the main one was that you always have to put a limit [on yourself] as far as what you want to show, and my limit was to never show an actual close-up of a syringe or a needle going into the vein.A lot of people had the same reaction as you did as far as needles in the film are concerned. It reminded me of the reaction that people had to the nose break in Titane — you actually don't see anything, but there is such a buildup that people actually think that they saw the nose break. The way your mind creates a link between the gaps in visuals is absolutely fascinating. I think it's beautiful. It’s the magic of cinema.“The way your mind creates a link between the gaps in visuals is absolutely fascinating. I think it's beautiful. It’s the magic of cinema.”Why do you impose these limits when you're making a film? Is it just that you don’t want to make a splatter film, or …?I never want to make a splatter film, that's for sure. I also have limits as far as nudity and casting choices: For example, Alpha takes place in the '90s, and the disease [in the film] provokes the same reactions as AIDS did at that time. That impacted my generation, but I really believe it's trickled down to others. [It impacted] our relationship not only with our own bodies, but with sexuality and bodies in general. Sex became a real danger and something that was not healthy — that meant death, basically.So I knew that I could not avoid the topic of sexuality in the film, [even if] it would not be the center of it. It’s a coming-of-age movie about a teenager, but the topic of sexuality in the context of a pandemic is essential. And so I did not want to work with a minor. The way [sexuality] is treated in the film corresponds to such trauma, I didn't feel like I wanted to live this with someone who was too young to not only understand the darkness of it, but to actually portray it. So I told my casting director, “We have to look for young women, 18-plus, who look younger than their age, in order to not dance around the topic of my film while I’m directing them.” These are the kind of limits that you have to put on yourself as a director.Going back to the needles, [that approach] was obvious to me because knowing where I came from with my two first features, I knew that people would expect to be disturbed, to be squirming. This film, to me, is a family drama, and it’s all about empathy and unconditional love for characters who have been deemed lesser by society. And I think that it would have been blasphemous to try to play on that element of disgust, to use the tools that you would use with body horror. I don't think [Alpha] is body horror at all.Alpha is comforted by her mother. | NeonDo you think that from now on, people are going to assume that whatever film you make will be body horror?Honestly, I'm not very concerned by this, because for me, I have to remain free to make the movies that I need to make at the moment when I need to make them. Empathy and love were so much at the center of this film, so I was very aware that I needed to be very clear that I would never attempt to create any form of shock value as far as this film was concerned.I tend to think about my films [in terms of] genre tools. Alpha is not a realistic film. But I have to think about how I'm going to incorporate [these tools] in this specific film, and what kind of emotion I want the audience to feel. Here, because it was empathy, the way I first portray the symptoms of the disease in the film is very anti-climactic. You discover the symptoms of the disease through [Golshifteh Farahani’s] eyes, which are caring and empathetic, and not by building up tension and giving you a jump scare.Yeah. It builds up really slowly. At first, it's just a little powder, a little cough.The camera ends up [lingering] on this patient who has died and along her body, you follow [Farahani’s] gesture, taking the needles out his arms, removing the air tubes. These are all very natural gestures of a doctor caring for her patients. That's how I wanted to approach the use of genre in the film, rather than something that was going to be shocking or repelling.“Love and fear are two sides of the same coin.”You mention Alpha’s mother — she is a doctor, and she is very devoted to her patients. But her empathy is also affecting her daughter in negative ways.Love and fear are two sides of the same coin. From the moment you fall in love or you have a child, you're afraid to lose the object of your love. Especially when we're talking about a trauma that has never been grieved, has never been lived through in a cathartic way or a healthy way, I really believe that all the blame and shame that society put on [AIDS patients] deprived the families of actual mourning.And when you cannot grieve, it creates more trauma, and that this trauma trickles down to the next generation. Alpha definitely is the recipient of her mom's trauma. She's an only daughter of a single mom, and she completely idealizes her mom because of her job, but also because she's the only person she has. And so she's like a sponge with her mom's trauma. Her mom's love is ambiguous, but I think that love in general is ambiguous.On the topic of unresolved or unprocessed trauma — the film has this dream structure where at times the timelines blend and it's not clear if certain characters are dead or alive. Was this approach tied to that theme?Trauma is never linear. It's constantly assaulted by the past: flashbacks, panic attacks, images that really eat your brain up. It’s also engulfed by a wave of anticipation, of fear that what happened could happen again in the future. So the present is never there. It's always pushed in between past and future, and this creates a kind of maze-like feeling of not belonging to the present. I knew that my structure had to reflect that in order for the audience to actually feel the anxiety that is linked to this absence of the present. The thing that I wanted [viewers] to relate to was the emotional aspect of being thrown into this maelstrom of timelines in order for you to reach the sequence that resolves the trauma. That was definitely there in the script, and I decided later on that I would play with grading and sound design in the shifts [between timelines], with lingering sounds and lingering colors that really make them intertwine.The movie’s AIDS metaphor was important to Ducournau. | NeonYou're obviously drawing from AIDS, and the reaction to AIDS, in this film. When I was growing up in the '90s, people would scream and run away from a drop of blood. Was it like that for you as well?100 percent. I distinctly remember a scene from when I was in primary school. There was this kid who fell playing soccer in the courtyard, and he was bleeding from his knee. And no one would talk to him for days, because the sight of blood meant that you were sick.Paranoia, fear, and the general rejection of otherness was palpable everywhere. I think about this period as a very dark age, because all the traumas that we had to go through and never quite processed were completely imposed by the way everyone — every government, every media outlet — treated [AIDS] and the people who were affected by it. I remember an extremely precise atmosphere of homophobia. It was a very dark age.It's strange, because I’ve read many times about my film being a dystopia. And to me, that's reality. Obviously, again, it's not a realistic film, but as far as this atmosphere of doom that is almost apocalyptic, I think that it’s not a dystopia at all. It stemmed from this feeling [from the height of the AIDS epidemic] that we were living in a world where we were all doomed to die, basically. Sex was death, other people were death, and that was dark.In the U.S., it took Ronald Reagan a long time to even acknowledge AIDS because it was a “gay disease.” Homophobia is very wrapped up in the stigma we’re talking about here.It was the same in France. The targeting of the LGBTQ+ community and of [intravenous drug users] was really overt everywhere. It was not something that belonged to a particular country or culture. It was the entire world blaming and shaming a fringe population as a scapegoat in order to not have to deal with something that concerned everyone, because they did not have the tools or the knowledge or even the will to deal with it. And there were never any reparations for that.I think that nowadays, even though there are treatments that allow people who are infected by HIV to live a full life — and thank God for that — the social stigma is still extremely present. It's still something that’s taboo to talk about, that we have not repaired, that we have not resolved. And that started 40, 45 years ago.“It's still something that’s taboo to talk about, that we have not repaired, that we have not resolved.”Do you think that the COVID pandemic resurfaced some of these unresolved traumas?Probably, but not in the same way. The stigma was not the same. Deep down, it must not be a coincidence for me to have started rewriting this film two years after COVID pandemic began. That must have triggered things, the global aspect of the disease and the rapidity at which it spread out into the world and the absence of action on the part of the world must have triggered this. But we did not target one population and use them as scapegoats [with COVID].However, I do believe that there was a different form of shaming that targeted young people, because the progression in life of a lot of young people stopped [during lockdowns]. It did put a stop to lives that were starting, and this created a lot of depression. I remember reading that a third of the 18- to 25-year-olds actually underwent depression [during that time]. And that's something that, again, when the lockdown was over and the vaccine was found, we never acknowledged that a huge part of the population went through depression, which is a severe condition.And we blamed the younger population for not being able to find jobs, when we know that an economic crash ensued after all the lockdowns everywhere. So, I mean, there is a shift in the blame. The stigma is not the same at all, but it feels like blame and finding a scapegoat will always be our first resort in a state of general panic. And it feels like we will never learn this lesson.Distributed by NEON, Alpha is now playing in theaters.