Empire, The
Entry updated 22 June 2026. Tagged: Film.
French film (2024; original title L'Empire). Tessalit Productions, Red Balloon Film, Ascent Film, Novak Prod, Rosa Filmes, Furyo Films, Shelter Prod, RTBF. Written and directed by Bruno Dumont. Cast includes Camille Cottin, Lyna Khoudri, Fabrice Luchini, Julien Manier, Anamaria Vartolomei and Brandon Vlighe. 111 minutes. Colour.
A small seaside town in Normandy becomes the battleground for the control of Earth by two galactic forces, the demonic 0s, who wish to spread evil, and the angelic 1s, whose mission is peace and harmony. The focus of their conflict is a seemingly ordinary baby, who is in fact The Wain, a half-human half-demon who is in an obscure way the key to the future of the galaxy. Lightsabre-wielding members of each side engage in desultory conflict and fleeting sexual encounters, and are served by knights on horseback, while awaiting the arrival of Beelzebub (Luchini) and the Queen of the 1s (Cottin) to arrive on Earth, while comically inept cops investigate one of the resulting deaths. In the end, the battle takes place offscreen far from Earth, leaving the police baffled and the rest of the human population seemingly unaware anything unusual had taken place.
Even in a directorial career taking in austere spiritual dramas, Absurdist comedies and a rock musical about the early life of Joan of Arc, this deadpan Parody of Star Wars (1977) and its imitators is a baffling curveball. Veteran French actor Luchini plays the evil emperor as broadly as possible, including several dance routines, and the return of the bumbling cops from Dumont's hit miniseries P'tit Quinquin (2014) adds some wonderful comic relief, but the rest of the film is played absolutely straight. The reduction of the forces of good and evil to binary numbers sharply focuses the dismissal of moral absolutes, although any social commentary about uncaring powers blithely using the majority of the population for their own purposes is muddied by the almost complete absence of any ordinary people from the film. Dumont's signature evocation of the land- and seascape of northern France effectively evokes a place which has seen conflict many times before – as action takes place in a World War Two bunker and royal castles – and survives each time. [CWa]
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