New Order is a dystopian drama that has more interest in suffering than any coherent point. It is relentlessly bleak and cynical, a film that depicts mass murder and ritualized execution with no real protagonist or redeemable character. Written and directed by Michel Franco, this film is almost admirable in its nakedly cynical viewpoint. What is missing, however, is a consistent point of view or a strong sense of world-building. “There are flawed people on both sides” is the easiest way to summarize what happens because New Order is too superficial for anything deeper.
The film depicts a violent revolution in modern Mexico. Broadly speaking, the poor start attacking the rich, slaughtering them and stealing what they can from their opulent, borderline obscene homes. Our entry point is a wedding at a lavish mansion, one where both the poor and rich are equally nasty, although a handful of characters nearly bridge that divide. Rolando (Eligio Meléndez) was the longtime domestic worker for the family that owns this home, and he needs some money to pay for his wife’s expensive surgery. The bride Marianne (Naian Gonzalez Norvind) takes pity on him, then leaves her own wedding to get the necessary assistance from a local hospital. She does know a tense situation is about to get a lot worse, so Marianne is taken hostage by paramilitary forces.
Franco films everything at the ground level, so the overall effect is bewildering. We get no sense of what the revolutionaries want, or the government’s official response. Maybe the larger point is that on-the-ground reality is completely out of touch with high-level decisions because all the foot soldiers are either too cruel or corrupt to follow the rules. What does interest Franco is different kinds of human brutality. Bystanders are shot, beaten, tortured, raped, hung and set on fire. Each plot development makes this situation seem more hopeless than the last. There is no suspense or horror, only a dull realization there is little attempt to grapple with this material.
One additional, more provocative subtext is how New Order handles race. All the wealthy Mexicans have lighter, more European features, while the violent revolutionaries have darker features. It is sort of like Roma, except with gunplay replacing any sort of attempt at sensitivity. Franco does not have the required curiosity or rigor to explore this topic, so it devolves into ugly caricature. There are some formal flourishes that add intrigue to his divide, particularly as the revolutionaries scale the walls of the home like wraiths, but its moral framework is about as sophisticated as an ill-conceived political cartoon.
Perhaps Franco wants to make a political thriller, something worthy of Z or The Battle of Algiers. A more accurate basis for comparison is the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. This show takes the original Margaret Atwood novel, then focuses almost entirely on how women are brutalized in a religious patriarchy. The violence is the point, not the immoral ideas that inform said violence. New Order wants to shows how easily victims can be perpetrators, and vice versa. The unresolved questions do not engage the imagination. Instead, they’re just lazy.
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