From the producer of The Professional and The Fifth Element and starring Jean Reno (The Professional) this intense horror/thriller finds a woman suffering from nightmares and bouts of amnesia mysteriously tied to a series of gruesome murders around Paris. Anna Heymes (Arly Jover), the wife of a senior government official, is experiencing the loss of memory and terrifying hallucinations. In the Turkish neighborhood of Paris, two police officers, Nerteaux (Jocelyn Quivrin) and Schiffer (Reno), are trying to solve the mystery of the sadistic murders of three women, all clandestine Turkish laborers. While the upright Nerteaux is determined to stop the killings, Schiffer is a dirty cop whose real goals are more questionable. In the course of the investigation, they discover that an armed branch of the Turkish mafia might be responsible for the murders. At the same time, Anna learns that her face has been transformed by plastic surgery, leaving nothing of her previous appearance. The link between Anna and the three victims becomes ever more clear as Anna's horrible past is progressively revealed to her, to Nerteaux, and to Schiffer
Anna (Arly Jover, Blade) is losing her memory. It started the day she failed to recognize her husband, Laurent (Philippe Bas). "I'm going crazy," she whispers to herself. Then at a dinner party, faces suddenly morph into death masks. Elsewhere in Paris, Captain Nerteaux (Jocelyn Quivrin, Syriana) is trying to catch a serial killer. The three female victims, all Turkish illegals, were tortured and mutilated. Out of desperation, Nerteaux turns to "Shifty" Schiffer (a blond Jean Reno) for help. A brutal cop with ties to the Turkish underworld, Schiffer is easily persuaded. (Too easily, perhaps.) Meanwhile, Anna begins seeing Dr. Mathilde (Laura Morante, The Son's Room). Despite the freaky Francis Bacon painting in her waiting room, which Anna finds terrifying, Mathilde turns out to be a sympathetic psychiatrist who helps unravel the truth about her condition--her face was altered and her memory erased. At the same time, Schiffer helps Nerteaux to solve his mystery. The link between the two is a right-wing organization called the Grey Wolves, which will lead all of them to Turkey for the explosive climax. Empire of the Wolves exerts the same grim fascination as The Crimson Rivers, a previous Jean-Christophe Grangé adaptation featuring Reno. While it marks a minor entry in the versatile actor's career, the gripping (if over-long) thriller ultimately belongs to Jover, whose Anna is as divided against herself as Anne Parillaud's La Femme Nikita. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
