[Review] New Order is as Vicious as it is Confronting in its Nihilism

The problem with writer/director Michel Franco’s New Order, which is evidenced by the reviews that compare his latest film to such disparate works like Parasite and Aftershock, is that it doesn’t push a particular “side” in its socio-economic fable. It asks us to follow along with a rich, bourgeois family and its servants unable to face the economic crisis threatening the nation at large; a sort of sympathy for the devil narrative erupts over the one empathetic member of a rich family, before going for the jugular with fascist teeth. It’s a lot of a movie, wrapped in a very slim 88 minute runtime, that powers through its fascinating and equally horrifying imagery, all while wearing its nihilistic heart on its sleeve. 

After the film had ended, I wondered how I would review a film that felt less like a traditional narrative and more like a series of painful images. I also wondered what, exactly, it was trying to say. New Order opens with a series of images that felt almost like a storyboard or a mood board of the films’ themes and shocks. A naked woman standing in green-tinted water. Another woman dragging a body, presumably dead, down a hall. A woman getting fitted for her wedding dress while an explosion of green paint covers the street-facing window. Images of people lying, somewhat dispassionately, in bed. 

It’s a confusing cacophony of visuals that sets an ominous tone before it settles on a hospital ward with sick women who are quickly displaced due to the incoming remnants of violence needing immediate attention. While the chaos spreads in the hospital, Rolando (Eligio Melendez) is told by a doctor that he should bring his wife to the doctor’s private clinic and that her medical fees will be 200,000 pesos. It’s a piece of information that feels like set dressing but instead becomes the lynchpin that carries the conflict. 

Quickly, Franco cuts to a lavish wedding in an expensive house that looks like a military compound, with its brutalistic design. Marianne (Naian González Norvind) is getting married to Alan (Dario Yazbek Bernal), surrounded by both families’ rich and well-connected friends. The signs of political unrest try to seep into the celebrations, such as a faucet that runs green and guests who show up trying to ignore the unrest outside, including one who talks of trouble at the airport and another who was pelted with green paint. Outside, military vehicles race by the house and a car has been splattered green. Rolando shows up, requesting money from the family. He used to work for them, but, as is constantly pointed out, that was eight years ago. Only Marianne shows empathy towards his situation and tries to round up the needed money, only to be roadblocked by her family.

As mentioned above, some have compared New Order to Parasite because both tackle the systemic (and cyclic) issue of class disparity between the rich and the poor. I’d add a different textual comparison, particularly for this early section, that hits a bit closer to the standard horror foundation that Michel Franco operates in. Like New Order, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is about a group of rich nobles who hide away from the horrible truth lingering just outside their compound. Granted, this family is holding a wedding instead of a masquerade ball and the thing they are ignoring is the nation’s unrest instead of a plague, but the connection, particularly in the first act, is too obvious to miss. 

The first act quickly ends with Marianne leaving the home with her servant’s son Cristian (Fernando Cuautle) to go to Rolando’s house and give him the necessary money. And as she leaves, like the Red Death before, the celebration is interrupted by its own specter of mortality as the protestors storm the house and violence erupts throughout the city. Seizing on the city’s unrest, the military swoops in and enacts martial law as Marianne ends up kidnapped. 

Franco and his cinematographer Yves Cape capture the resulting chaos with a simultaneously intimate and apathetic eye. They shoot the siege of the house by focusing on individual members of the family introduced in the brisk opening 24 minutes but contrast it with an almost detached view of the violence erupting around the city. The aftermath of the uprising, in particular, is filmed so dispassionately, capturing bodies mingled with blood and green paint. A solitary image of a mangy dog lapping up blood as a military vehicle drives by provides a haunting, almost post-apocalyptic sheen. 

New Order follows specific members of Marianne’s family, as well as their servants (who have their hierarchical socio-economic standing represented in their outfits), as they navigate the new normal and the narrative encapsulates a few months in their lives post house siege. It follows Marianne and her dire situation as well as her husband and her brother Daniel (Diego Boneta) as they search for her. But it also follows one of their servants Marta (Mónica Del Carmen), Cristian and Rolando as they get roped into the events. It creates a holistic approach of how the dire socio-economic situation envelopes the rich and the poor by focusing on this one family and their employees. 

Michel Franco’s film is confronting and bleak. It shows humanity at its absolute worst and then, somehow, descends further. There's no room for empathy or kindness in the world Franco creates and those who try to break free of apathy are severely punished. He suggests a world where the only way to get ahead it's to perpetuate this circle of violence. The casual bloodshed and the sexual assault on display is genuinely upsetting and yet the film felt paced to perfection; an ever-flowing and slow-building scream throughout its slender runtime. Scenes fold into each other and create a seamless portrait of pain and suffering, the kind of which might be represented by a specific piece of art hung in Marianne’s home. Called Solo los muertos han visto el final de la guerra (“Only the dead have seen the end of war”), this piece of abstract art cuts to the center of the themes New Order explores in its circuitous journey through a quickly war-torn city. 

It’s a frustrating film because it’s so confronting and unabashedly not giving easy answers. Its entry point is this bourgeois family and it does show the evil inherent in their casual disdain and apathy for those who don’t have their wealth. But it's just as vicious showing the violence subjected on their bodies by the people they’ve ignored for so long. Ultimately, if the film has any particular motivation, it shows how quickly a fasicist regime can rise and take control of a powder keg of socio-economic volatility as the sides squabble. It’s a dizzying film that I don’t particularly want to watch again, probably because it is so brilliantly conceived, deeply upsetting and viciously confronting in its violent message.