{"id":201888,"date":"2025-10-15T13:36:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T13:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/201888\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T13:36:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T13:36:08","slug":"julia-ducournau-is-back-with-a-new-body-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/201888\/","title":{"rendered":"Julia Ducournau Is Back With A New Body Horror"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With her first two feature films, 2016&#8217;s subversive cannibal chiller <a href=\"https:\/\/www.empireonline.com\/movies\/reviews\/raw-review\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Raw<\/a> and 2021 object sexuality body horror <a href=\"https:\/\/www.empireonline.com\/movies\/reviews\/titane\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Titane<\/a>, French director Julia Ducournau announced herself as one of the boldest genre filmmakers working today. And if the first trailer for Alpha \u2014 Ducournau&#8217;s latest mononymously titled movie \u2014 is anything to go by, then that status isn&#8217;t about to change anytime soon. A coming-of-age tale with a now-trademark Ducournau body horror twist, Alpha follows a teenage girl (M\u00e9lissa Boros) who gets a dodgy tattoo and consequently finds herself afflicted with a new disease that&#8217;s turning people to marble, much to the horror of her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani). Sound wild? Well it looks it, too \u2014 just check out the trailer:<\/p>\n<p>Hoo boy \u2014 well that was intense! Rounding out what you could reasonably call Ducournau&#8217;s &#8216;Transformation Trilogy&#8217;, it looks like Alpha is dialling down the horror a little and dialling up the human drama a lot, keying into the mother-daughter relationship between Boros&#8217;s titular teen and Farahani while exploring what appears to be a fairly direct Aids allegory. But if this trailer teases a more intimate, emotional piece than Ducournau&#8217;s more outr\u00e9 genre-driven past works, the body horror elements \u2014 a fixation on flesh and blood and the mutation of the female body \u2014 still remain present and correct, promising we&#8217;ll likely find ourselves squirming as well as crying in our seats before the credits roll. There&#8217;s also the presence of Tahar Rahim&#8217;s (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.empireonline.com\/movies\/reviews\/madame-web\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Madame Web<\/a>) Amin \u2014 a drug addict suffering with the marbleising condition who&#8217; has an as-yet-unexplained connection&#8217;s somehow to Alpha and her mother \u2014 to mull over, too. Hmm&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Having made waves when it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, the discourse already promises to be strong with this one \u2014 and honestly, anything less from a Julia Ducournau joint would be a major disappointment. We look forward to finding out whether Alpha is destined to dominate our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.empireonline.com\/movies\/features\/best-movies-2025\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">movies of the year<\/a> list when it hits UK cinemas on 14 November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With her first two feature films, 2016&#8217;s subversive cannibal chiller Raw and 2021 object sexuality body horror Titane,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201889,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-201888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}