Alpha teaser review: Alia Bhatt embracing gore is delightful

The teaser of Alpha, Yash Raj Films’ long-awaited spy thriller, begins in a manner evocative of Luc Besson thrillers. The film has a older mentor, young female mentee dynamic that were signature of Besson’s Leon and La Femme Nikita. The staging of Alpha’s scene, featuring Bobby Deol and Alia Bhatt, is similar to one in Nikita (featuring Anne Parillaud and Jeanne Moreau). If it was an homage, it is a good choice; if it’s a copy, then it gets at least one thing right: the focus on the actors’ eyes.
Alpha teaser has its moments of action and violent deaths. But amid all this, director Shiv Rawail never loses focus on what is important – the emotion. The framing of the scenes – even the action set-pieces – keeps Alia’s face and emotions dead at the centre of it all. That alone is enough to help Alpha stand out from the YRF Spy Universe stable. It may follow a formula, but at least it does it smartly enough.
The tease opens with the protagonist having a quiet dinner with her ‘baba’ (Bobby) at a restaurant. It’s her 18th birthday and his gift to her is her first kill. In rustic Haryanvi, Bobby says this is the greatest gift – starting out on the journey you have been trained for all your life. We then see a montage of a young Alia being inducted into a secret program called Alpha. They are training soldiers of the future. Bobby says he is the wolf, and Alia replies that a wolf’s daughter is wolf herself. Some smartly cut action scenes follow, where Alia looks comfortable kicking butt. The action is slick and even brutal. And it all comes together with a magnificently filmed final shot where Alia delivers her first kill, covered in blood as the Happy Birthday song plays in the background.
As the director of The Railway Men, one of the best shows on Indian streaming, Shiv Rawail has a different pedigree than the other directors to have helmed YRF Spy Universe films. And that distinction shows in the short teaser. Everything, from the sly smile on a bloodsoaked Alia’s face to her vulnerability in the opening exchange, is a departure from the YRF norm of ‘cooler is better’. Here, the coolness comes from the raw emotion, not merely the slickness of the execution. Don’t get me wrong. Alpha still follows the same beats as a War of a Pathaan in terms of its slickness, but the world-building and emotional connect is very raw, akin to how Shiv Rawail did in his acclaimed series. That newness was necessary for the franchise after the blow it suffered with War 2.