Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston has left the country, posting up this week in the Great White North to cover the 51st Toronto International Film Festival. As usual, and perhaps now more than ever, we wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing 2026 coverage, get rolling with our official curtain-raiser, and revisit the complete Vanyaland coverage archives from past TIFF editions.
Some folks just can’t stand silliness. Consternation followed David and Nathan Zellner’s Alpha Gang after its premiere at the Princess of Wales last Sunday, and I deeply empathize with those who took to the Internet to complain about how weird and shoddy it seems. It really, really sucks not to be in on the joke, and to someone who doesn’t find the Zellners’ post-modern sensibility funny, I imagine a movie like Alpha Gang would be pure torture on par with having to eat buttery popcorn with paper cuts on each finger. Hell, I’m not even immune to it with the Zellners’ other features – Kumiko The Treasure Hunter is a bit too mean-spirited for me, Damsel’s just right, and Sasquatch Sunset had a perspective fine-tuned to piss me off more than any movie with a shitting and pissing Bigfoot should – but this is just so goddamn silly that I find it hard to believe that anyone could accuse it of being “shoddy” or whatever. That’s about as bad as saying that it looks like a Wes Anderson movie.
This comparison doesn’t make much sense unless one’s idea of Anderson’s style is “folks in funny period dress do things in a somewhat stilted fashion.” Practically, this is closer to the work of Quentin Dupieux, whose highly stylized French-language comedies like Keep an Eye Out! and Smoking Causes Coughing blend the look and feel of classic cinematic periods with hypermodern absurdity. Here, it’s a bizarre genre fusion of a biker/greaser gang movie and a covert alien-invasion film, with each making as little sense in context as it does on the page. Picture this: It’s Europe, sometime in the 20th century (though it’s not really specified when and where), and a gang of alien bikers has taken over a castle while a war rages outside its fortifications. They’re the Alpha Gang, an advance strike force meant to destabilize the world prior to a full conquest. Each has a designation – the leader is Alpha One (Lea Seydoux, whose appearance here really brings out the Dupieux tasting notes), Alpha Two (Dave Bautista) is the muscle, and so on and so forth – and they spend most of their time dancing to doo-wop, eating pea soup and mangos, and killing the locals.
Our entry point to this weird world comes with the arrival of Alpha Six (Riley Keough), who takes human form near an exotic and strange sculpture. They’re energy beings (I think), and being placed into a fleshy body has a few major disadvantages. For one, they’re not nearly as powerful as they might be otherwise – their machine guns may be chrome, and their suits of battle armor shiny and clean, but they can still get taken out by small arms fire, bleeding blue through the holes in their leather jackets. She’s picked up by Alpha Three (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and taken to meet the rest of the gang, where Alpha Four (Lily Rose-Depp) and Alpha Five (Phillipa Soo) have already settled in. That’s where the real problem reveals itself: There’s an infection spreading among the aliens. It’s called “emotions,” and it’s messing with their ability to finish the mission. Four finds herself sparing a wounded soldier, Five’s nursing feelings for Six, and Three is, well, emo. He also falls in love with a messenger falcon, who may actually be a double agent.
This, rather than any of the intrigue surrounding a Beta Gang (led by an eye-patch and Aussie-accented Cate Blanchett) or the real Alpha Six (Chris Pine), is where the movie gets most of its mileage. The “emotion” disease is less “falling in love with humanity and wanting to save the beauty of the world” than it is an extremely intense puberty, complete with crushes, anxieties, unexplained sadness, horniness, fear, and lots and lots of swearing. Watching these straight-laced figures slowly lose themselves to the most intense and basest form of emotion is deeply, deeply funny. They’re all sympathetic morons who don’t have an understanding of tactics or how to work as a team in an environment like this, and they’re prone to popping off at the strangest moments. There’s a sequence where they unload thousands of bullets – Bautista dual-wielding sideloading machine guns, Seydoux winding a Gatling gun – after Soo discovers a colony of ants making its way up her leg.
The Zellners have cast this film wonderfully, as each performer in the core ensemble has an unflappable, straight-laced quality that they can play off of. Not one of them ever winks at you, with the bits played deadly seriously, like Pine’s long, strange journey to the castle, where he discovers water, women, alcohol, and much more at a country tavern. It’s impeccably realized, with a swell score composed by The Octopus Project and period-evocative cinematography from the great Mike Gioulakis. And, sure, you could probably read something into this about invading a country when you don’t really understand anything about their culture or customs – the biker gang aesthetic is hilariously inappropriate for this setting – but genuinely I think leading with your head on this one is a mistake. There’s so much worth laughing at in Alpha Gang that trying to pin it down to a specific statement or interpretation would feel aggressively simplistic, not to mention ridiculous. So, yeah, this is a delight, and I look forward to the Zellners alienating the hell out of me with whatever they do next. We’re on again, and I bet I’m off again for the next one.