The North African family French critics couldn’t see

Since her 2016 debut feature Raw, the French auteur Julia Ducournau’s films have been a staple of the body horror genre. Her movies reflect an unapologetic approach to exploring physical transformation and the “monstrous feminine,” an idea coined by feminist film scholar Barbara Creed to underscore the significance of gender and sexuality in the construction of monstrosity. In Ducournau’s films, female characters strive for emancipation from social and familial norms through cannibalism or transhumanism. Yet while Raw and her sophomore feature Titane (2021) center white protagonists, Alpha (2025), her third film, foregrounds the complex dynamic of a family of North African descent, marking a significant departure for the auteur. Curiously, this demographic difference has been almost entirely absent from discussions of the film.

Set between the 1980s and 1990s, Alpha follows its 13-year-old eponymous character; her mother, who is a doctor; and her uncle Amin as they confront a mysterious virus that transforms bodies into blue-veined marmoreal statues that eventually turn to dust. Critics have understandably focused on the epidemic narrative, the stigma attached to the infected, and its evocation of the AIDS crisis, but in doing so, they have overlooked another dimension of the story: Alpha is one of the few contemporary French films to place a family of North African origin at the center of a national trauma.

Ducournau hardly conceals the central family’s roots. She casts actors of Algerian, Moroccan, and Iranian descent and the characters move between French and dialectal Arabic. In one scene that features the most cinematic French postcolonial locality — the banlieue — Alpha joins her extended family to share a couscous meal for an Eid celebration. The problem here is not simply that reviewers omitted demographic details but that their silence in effect reproduces a broader tendency and difficulty within French cultural discourse to see race, acknowledge colonial history, and address postcolonial belonging even when it permeates the screen.

Approaching Alpha through a postcolonial lens opens more interpretative possibilities. Consider the body itself, a central concern of Ducournau’s cinema: Alpha’s makeshift tattoo, which symbolically binds her to Amin, evokes traditions of Amazigh inking while also drawing attention to the postcolonial body as a site of inscription, memory, and belonging. The gesture turns the body into a site where cultural memory can persist without being explicitly articulated; Alpha’s body becomes a postcolonial archive — a place where histories and affiliations that remain largely unspoken can nonetheless be inscribed, carried, and transmitted. Furthermore, the film’s concern with body regulation recalls the colonial politics of visibility explored by Frantz Fanon in his writings on French Algeria, where the control of bodies, especially female bodies through the practice of unveiling, functioned as a mechanism of domination.

Alpha’s epidemic narrative also takes on new meanings when viewed through the history of North African migration. The AIDS crisis in France disproportionally affected marginalized communities. According to a 1999 study led by the French Institut de veille sanitaire, or Institute of Health Surveillance, between 1978 and 1998, immigrant populations accounted for 14 percent of AIDS cases in France, when they only represented 6 percent of the adult population at the time. Drug users of North African origin infected through contaminated needles, much like Amin, represented the main mode of contamination for heterosexual men and accounted for 45 percent of North African immigrant cases. Still, they remain largely absent from narratives of the epidemic. This omission and silence of the infected is the result of the religious taboo attached to the disease and the larger structural disinterest in these populations. Ducournau’s attention to Amin gestures towards histories that have largely escaped commemoration.

Alpha’s imagery of suffocation, disease, and social abandonment invites reflection of the lives and afterlives of colonial violence beyond France. The calcification of infected bodies recalls forms of historical petrification through which colonial atrocities are rendered distant, abstract, and invisible within French national memory. The structural and social segregation imposed on the sick in the film, illustrated in the hospital where they are contained in an isolated wing and through Alpha’s school bullying for fear of contamination, echoes this historical marginalization of colonial subjects whose sufferings and deaths have frequently been excluded from national narratives — the 1945 Sétif, Guelma, and Kherrata massacres and the October 1961 Paris massacre are germane examples of this. These historical exclusions can be traced back to the onset of colonial rule where the fact that the infected struggle and eventually can’t breathe recalls the asphyxiating enfumades practices the French army used in Algeria between 1844 and 1845. These are not direct allegories but rather resonances that emerge once the film is situated within the longer history of imperial France and its aftermath.

French film criticism has historically shown no hesitation in identifying and naming postcolonial cinemas. Films centered on racialized subjects are often read through the lens of immigration, integration, exclusion, or identity, so it is reasonable to ask why said frameworks disappear when confronted with a film by Ducournau. It seems that postcoloniality remains visible only when it is offered under the proper label of social issue. In that silence, French Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad’s observations about immigrants remain relevant: The immigrant is everywhere in the conversation, yet somehow still absent from it. Alpha’s monsters, its diseased bodies, and its haunting marble figures speak not only of illness and stigma but most importantly to the unresolved histories that continue to shape contemporary France and the ghosts of empire that remain lodged within the national body.

As the writer of Algerian heritage Louisa Yousfi reminds us in her essay Rester barbare (2022): “Our monsters are not born out of a lack of you; they are born out of too much of you — too much France, too much Empire.” Alpha’s monsters emerge from that same excess. To overlook the film’s North African dimension means missing one of its most provocative and generative possibilities: the true horror haunting Ducournau’s France may in the end not be the disease itself, but the histories the nation continues to struggle to see.