Trailer
Plot summary
In Upper Paleolithic Europe, twenty thousand years ago, a band of hunter-gatherers prepares for the hunt that will feed it through the winter. Tau, the chief, trains his teenage son Keda and lets him and his friend Kappa join the party; Rho, Tau's wife, doubts the boy is ready, but Tau disagrees. Tau hands Keda a captured boar to kill as a test, and Keda refuses. Amid the bison drive a bull throws Keda over a cliff edge, and the tribe, unable to reach him, moves on. Keda survives, splints his injured foot and climbs back to the clifftop, where the cairn his people left tells him he must travel home alone. Wolves chase him up a tree, and he wounds one that the pack abandons.
Cast
- Nashon Douglasas Lion Tribe #3 (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Alpha (2018)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Nobody in the film speaks English. The dialogue is in invented languages built by Christine Schreyer, an anthropology professor at UBC Okanagan: a main tongue she calls Beama, spoken in two dialects and drawn from Proto-Nostratic, Proto-Eurasiatic and Proto-Dené-Caucasian, plus a separate Neanderthal language for one scene.
- The production was investigated over the alleged deaths of five Alberta bison during filming. The American Humane Association refused the film its "No Animals Were Harmed" end-credit certification, and PETA called for a boycott two days before release.
