For the love of dog
Smit-McPhee’s performance is astonishing and believable
The tagline for Alpha is certainly ambitious: “Experience the incredible story of how mankind discovered man’s best friend.”
It’s enough to make anthropologists weep and movie critics, well, even more cynical.
And although highly speculative, Alpha is actually a credible and creditable story about the first domestication of a canine.
Set in Europe 20,000 years ago, the story centres on Keda ( The Road’s Kodi Smit-McPhee), the son of the chieftain embarking on his first hunt. His father Tau (Johannes Haukur Johannesson) is stern but wise, while his mother Nu (Mercedes de la Zerda) worries that he may lack his father’s steely strength. Alpha K (out of 4) Starring Kodi SmitMcPhee and Johannes Haukur Johannesson. Directed by Albert Hughes. 96 minutes. Opens Friday at major theatres. PG
Things go badly awry when Keda is tossed off a cliff by a stampeding bison and left for dead on a narrow precipice. In fact, he’s saved by a raging flash flood below only to find himself injured and alone in a forbidding wilderness where he encounters an injured wolf who, like him, is separated from his pack.
Using rudimentary tools to make fire and to hunt, he forms an unexpected and unlikely alliance with the wolf, whose wound he is able to heal with the use of maggots as he struggles to find his way home with winter closing in.
Director Albert Hughes (solo after years of collaborating with twin brother Allen) does a superb job of drawing all the elements together to make the story authentic and compelling.
In casting Smit-McPhee, a young Australian actor, Hughes has overcome the biggest challenge. Smit-McPhee’s performance is astonishing, and believable in every respect as a boy on the cusp of adulthood who must dig deep to find the courage and resourcefulness to survive. Johannesson is similarly solid as his father.
Much of the film was shot in British Columbia and Alberta, and the cinematography is glorious throughout, evoking a time when humans were minor players in a world of forbidding landscapes and fearsome predators. The film is shot in 3D, usually an unnecessary frill, but Hughes uses it with commendable restraint, injecting a subtle magic to birds in flight, fog and sunlight and clouds of dust.
It’s clear that some effort has been made to recreate the garb and tools — obsidian knives and stone-tipped spears — on which early humans relied. The use of maggots to clean wounds, for example, is among the many instructive details that make the film a learning experience.
It’s possible that Alpha may be too intense for really young viewers. The orchestrated stampede that sends bison to their deaths, and the harrowing encounters with various beasts may be too much for children.
But this is a film that will resonate with a very broad audience, beautifully shot, with a great lead performance and an endearing story of survival and collaboration in a bygone time that will move and engage audiences.