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For all the insanity of a Julia Ducournau film – the flesh-eating, the vehicular sex, the serial killings – there is always a tender core to her work. Raw was a pure coming-of-age story beyond its cannibalistic exterior; Titane a blood-and-oil-soaked meditation on identity and radical love. So, it’s no surprise that Ducournau responds when other filmmakers blend gory horror with deeply emotional moments too. Take this summer’s 28 Years Later, which for all its running-infected terror came to a hauntingly beautiful conclusion – particularly, the revelation of Ralph Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson and his ‘Bone Temple’, constructed of the skulls and skeletons of the thousands who died in the virus outbreak.
The message behind Kelson’s construct (“memento mori… memento amoris”) proved particularly touching to Ducournau, for the way it creates a monument to those lost. “And also makes them beautiful, makes them art,” she tells Empire. “That made me cry my eyes out. I bawled.” Ducournau’s latest work, Alpha – set in the ‘80s and ‘90s, about a virus that causes people to turn to marble – channels the impact and global response to the AIDS crisis, telling a similarly humanist story. “I think that both Danny Boyle and I tried to implement sacredness,” says Ducournau. “To build monuments to those we haven’t just lost, but have shunned. The ones that we vomited out of society, the ones that we pointed at, that we shamed.”
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The Alpha team had to dig deep, a production that brought different pressures to the sprawling madness of Ducournau’s last film. “There was almost an existential questioning happening on every take, changing angles, changing lines, to try to capture this moment of sheer humanity [Golshifteh Farahani and Tahar Rahim] were giving me,” she says of one particularly heartwrenching scene. “That was much more of — sorry for this word — a brainfuck than directing a five-minute oner with 400 extras and a crane, like I did in Titane.” Expect another hit of uncut Ducournau, straight from the heart.