Titane director Julia Ducournau returns with Alpha trailer

Julia Ducournau's long-awaited follow-up to Titane makes its trailer debut.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  December 12, 2025 | 7:00pm
Courtesy of Neon
Film News Julia Ducournau
Titane director Julia Ducournau returns with Alpha trailer

Four years after showing the Dominic Toretto’s of the world how to properly care for an automobile, Titane director Julia Ducournau returns with a new bodily nightmare. The trailer for Alpha, Ducournau’s follow-up to the 2021 Palme d’Or winner, dropped earlier today. It offers a different kind of intensity from the hard-charging, full-throttle body horror of Titane, one of our favorite films from 2021. Still, even when shifting into a different gear, Ducournau’s focus on relationships between daughters and parents remains clear.

The movie follows a 13-year-old girl named Alpha (Mélissa Boros) who gets drunk at a party and allows someone to give her a stick-and-poke scarlet letter “A” on her arm. Her mom (Golshifteh Farahani) is, understandably, not pleased with Alpha’s decision, and neither is her arm, which begins to show signs of infection.

While Alpha did compete for the Palme d’Or, it has not been as rapturously received as its predecessors, Titane and the director’s first feature, Raw. In her review for The A.V. Club, writer Tomris Laffly expressed major disappointment with the film and its central metaphor, writing, “Sadly, it doesn’t take long for Alpha to settle down in its themes and become an inexplicably shallow and simple-minded AIDS allegory.”
Alpha opens in theaters on March 27, 2026.

 
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