Alpha

Writer/Director Albert Hughes’ Alpha is a wonderful film to which every father of an adolescent boy should take his son.

It is a story of survival and coming of age that takes place 20,000 years ago, when the leader of a northern tribe (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) takes his son Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) on the boy’s first buffalo hunt, an experience during which the boy is pitched off a cliff by a huge animal and is presumed dead.

Keda’s survival and attempt to get home brings him into contact with a wounded wolf and the creation of man’s first bonding with the ancestor of present-day dogs.

The film works beautifully thanks to Smit-McPhee’s watchability and Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht’s stirring images.

I give Alpha a 4.6 out of 5.