Sean Parker
When I received the solicitation for Bruno Dumont’s whacked-out sci-fi comedy The Empire (L’empire), I thought, “His films are anchored pretty heavily on Christian-infused themes, but Flanders, Humanité, and France are all pretty good.” Plus, no matter how the film turned out, it was clearly going to look cinematic AF. For anyone who doesn’t know, when we receive solicitations, they’re a kind of one sheet that entices critics to see and review the film. It’s not unlike what moviegoers see either, in that we’re usually shown the poster along with peer quotes and accolades, but with the added benefit of a synopsis. In the case of The Empire, I didn’t know what to expect. The Empire’s poster seemed overly polished to a degree that made it look cheap. It’s not like I haven’t seen low-budget films before. Hell, that’s where I thrive. And the lauded “Beautifully crafted and certifiably insane” quote from The Hollywood Reporter gave me A New Hope.
Starting The Empire, I quickly felt lost. I didn’t really think too much of it, “this is just the film’s way of telling the story,” I tell myself. “All will be revealed soon!” Beginning on an empty beach, a naked woman paces through the sand dunes, talking on the phone while we voyeuristically watch from a distance. “Is Dumont treading similar ground to France?” I ponder momentarily if the age of internet celebrity is where we’re going next. As the film pivots away from our first POV character, Line (Lyna Khoudri), kneeling in the driveway of Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), the plot begins to take shape. However, it takes a while for Dumont to fully reveal all of its moving parts.
If you’ve been to the film’s IMDB page, you’ve probably read that this small town is “the battleground of undercover extraterrestrial knights.” Well, that’s true, but good luck trying to understand that in any capacity right off the bat. No clear-cut Jedis or Sith here. To spell it out, Jony is part of an evil organization that wants to bring about the apocalypse on Earth, and the half-human, half-alien baby he and his recently deceased ex-wife have is the antichrist. So, another faction of extraterrestrials have embedded themselves in the town to put a stop to the end of days.
It sure seems like an excellent setup for a big, silly movie, but The Empire is no Spaceballs. Small beach town, alien possession, a good versus evil plot that could conflagrate into a political mockery or science fiction parody, and everything seemed possible early on. The problem is the movie is overly banal and slightly pedantic, with much of its subtext causing conflict against the film’s story.
While on the surface, we have Jony, the devil, and his love interest Jane (Anamaria Bartolomei), an angel, going back and forth in their never-ending war with one another, there’s a subtextual idea gleaming underneath. When visiting with their respective hierarchies (or deities?), there are many visual context clues to surmise why the good guys are in a citadel with stained glass windows, as opposed to the bad guys who appear in a gaudy-looking space-traversing mansion filled with expensive wall molding garnished in golds and yellows and an uber-specific lawn shot that infers political satire. Though this is the type of intelligent symbolism I enjoy in satiric filmmaking, The Empire never rises past the level of diverting amusement into anything memorably funny or discernably laughable. And I’m no stranger to French satire, being a huge fan of Quentin Dupieux’s filmography and Jean-Christophe Meurisse’s 2021 shocker Bloody Oranges.
Generally speaking, I try to focus on the positives of any film that asks for criticism, but that isn’t easy with a film like The Empire, which is billed as a satiric comedy and doesn’t deliver. There’s an expectation for fun and laughter, but those are in short supply. I started to think I lacked context or was not as apprised of foreign affairs as I should have been to enjoy The Empire more thoroughly, but by the time the film was around three-quarters finished, I was mainly waiting for it to be over.
It could be that The Empire hinges itself as an additional adventure in Dumont’s Li’l Quinquin series, as Alane Delhaye and Bernard Pruvost resurrect their gendarmerie (police enforcement) characters from the miniseries and subsequent sequel series Coincoin and the Extra-Humans, which sounds like The Empire is the culminative-end. The film may stand on its own, but I don’t consider it a great experience as a newcomer. The Empire also leaves space for future adventures with these characters.
Here’s the good part: The Empire is beautiful to behold. The cinematography, color saturation, and art design are all fantastically well-crafted and, not to suggest the film is entirely style over substance, the film’s approach to the satiric concepts are so thickly layered they become blurred, obfuscated by an abundance of plot devices, Star Wars references, and an array of characters we never really form any connection with. The use of rip-off lightsabers, large spaceship fleets, and the Kylo Ren/Rey Skywalker opposition romanticism seems to exist solely to grab audience attention, as is the fact that the film is named The Empire. But even as a sci-fi epic, it isn’t exciting either.
Each side is then imbued with the aesthetics of religion and wealth, while the earthly characters remain confined to their banal lifestyles, fighting amongst themselves. The film considers the crusades waged in the name of God by power-hungry people who sit in their ivory towers far away from the fight. The funniest moment in The Empire is seeing one of the alien entities assume the vessel of the town’s mayor and watching them pretend to care about the townspeople’s problems. The Empire examines the line between good and evil, confusing it through human impulsiveness, selfishness, altruism, and other traits. This is a significant part of The Empire’s point, a sociopolitical effort to bring us together, likely through laughs in a communal theater. However, it never really satisfies any social argument or conveys any unifying measures beyond getting busy in an empty field with your enemy because that’s likely the only way we will all come together.
The Empire conquers theaters on March 7.
Bruno Dumont’s The Empire – Official U.S. Trailer
In theaters March 7, 2025. In a quiet and picturesque fishing village in Northern France, something finally happens: a special baby is born. A child so unique and peculiar that it unleashes a secret war between extraterrestrial forces of good and evil.
