Mid-18th century at the court of Louis XV: "he eats!", "he shits!" While the automaton exploits of Vaucanson's duck strike the three knocks of an era of Enlightenment and reason, the exhibition of the remains of the Beast of Gévaudan tolls the death knell for the centuries of darkness: "he was only a big wolf!" Yet women and children continue to die devoured in the forests around the castle of Saint-Alban. Two centuries later, in Saint-Alban as everywhere, the illusion of such a division between darkness and light has fizzled out. The Spanish anarchist psychiatrist François Tosquelles opens the walls of the asylum, lets the madmen out and the world in: the invention of institutional psychotherapy. Slipping into the breach of this spatial coincidence, Isabelle Prim invents a marvelous machine for confusing centuries and inner worlds. As every year in Saint-Alban, the asylum becomes a theater: madmen and not so madmen prepare a show about the Beast of Gévaudan. Agnès designs the poster, Thérèse stays in bed, haunted by her brother Bruno. The woods around the castle, where this disturbing character lives, a hermit-artist, a holy magician loved by children, are the interworld where all boundaries are abolished: a kingdom of play, fantasy, and belief. Among the many successful bets of this risky film on a wire, there is that of having actors play madness. What Prim accomplishes with her formidable troupe is astounding: embodying not madness but madness , singular and collective, in a way that is not only credible, but true. Les Loups is theater multiplied by the genius of the filmmaker's own editing: all the powers of the false to create a truth beyond the division between madness and reason. During this film, whose humor never strays from emotion, it is the very experience of Tosquelles' Saint-Alban that is rediscovered, re-shared: this very saving invention of a human environment where unreason can be deployed as an individual and anti-society genius. In this asylum, in this film, in the forests of Gévaudan, there is not " one big wolf." There are plenty of wolves, big and small, elusive bodies and unfathomable souls. Away from the performance, a man leaning against a wall reads this question in his notebook, in a low voice: "Can it be that the madman uses his reason to make an asylum of his madness?" The polymath of Wolves answers with a resounding "Yes!"