The Sands of Time
The Brood: Interminable, like all David Cronenberg movies before Videodrome. There are moments of note here and there, but it’s mostly thin gruel; even Scanners, which opens with one of the greatest special effects shots in film history, flatlines as soon as lead Stephen Lack takes over. Properly named, he’s a non-entity, just like Art Hindle and all of the other Canadian actors who appear in The Brood. Cronenberg’s popularity in the 2020s among movie fans is hard to overstate: his influence is impossible to miss in recent films by Coralie Fargeat, Julia Ducournau, and Michael Shanks, and he’s the best-selling director at the Charles Revival Series in Baltimore, surpassing David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick. But the Cronenberg crowd was thin for 1979’s The Brood—maybe they don’t go back that far?—and, not after long, totally bored.
The Brood isn’t funny or scary enough to make up for its chintzy essentials: an anonymous cast of Canadian actors who leave no impression, two stars in Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar who can’t do anything with the bland, expository dialogue, a poorly-recorded synthesizer score by Howard Shore, and agile cinematography by Mark Irwin compromised by drab sets, drab costumes, and too much dead air. The audience started spooked, but eventually gave in to laughter, an admission, conscious or not, that the movie doesn’t work, and judging by how many jumping beans there were in the crowd, taking their time coming in and out of the theater, I wasn’t alone in feeling those 95 minutes drag by. Cronenberg makes a movie where toddlers beat people to death with toy hammers completely uninteresting; the only moment that rose above the rest of the film was when one of the killer kids gets shot in the chest, but the mild gasp that got from the audience is a testament to how poorly Cronenberg handled that sequence and the rest of the movie.
Alpha: Julia Ducournau’s Alpha just opened in Baltimore, a year after its Cannes premiere and four and a half years after Titane, 2021 Palme d’Or winner, played here. Don’t expect anything hard and fast like Raw and Titane—this is a strange, shaggy movie that takes on a lot while remaining curiously inhibited. Mélissa Boros plays Alpha, a 13-year-old girl living in a particularly diseased time in Berber. Her father (Tahar Rahim) is a heroin addict, and his withdrawal symptoms parallel those of the infected, all lurching about while slowly turning to marble. Golshifteh Farahani plays Alpha’s mother, one of a handful of doctors willing to keep the local hospital open and treat patients, no matter how grim the prognosis or how many people show up at the door.
When Alpha premiered last year at Cannes, Ducournau was slammed for “trivializing” and “insulting” AIDS patients, although I’m sure the film’s biggest problem with reviewers and buyers was its dreadfully sloooooooooooooooow pace—I wasn’t surprised when Neon quickly acquired the film, only to dump it in a dozen theaters late last year, fulfilling contractual obligations. Just like the Oscar, there’s this myth that winning the Palme d’Or gets you set for life. Not true: look at Bong Joon-ho, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and now Ducournau. At least Alpha looks good, and as nonsensical as many of the song choices are, the sound design is good, with the deadly “Red Wind,” the sirocco, always droning in the background.
Alpha evokes AIDS but it is not about the disease. It’s also not a sensationalist film, so I’m surprised by how many people are feigning offense at the look and behavior of the infected. Ducournau wanted to make a film about a devastating period that still hasn’t been reckoned with, much like the COVID-19 pandemic. That such an earnest effort would be met with derision by film snobs is no surprise, and it only betrays the bloodlust coursing through much of modern America. I look forward to whatever Docournau has next, I just hope it doesn’t take another five years.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith