Mark Reviews Movies: NEW ORDER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 20, 2021

At the end of New Order, writer/director Michel Franco has a decent point to make about militarism and how it makes victims of everyone, by assigning the status of "enemy" to particular groups. The system of government at the end of this movie, which sees an overtly violent uprising of the impoverished and oppressed transforming into a semi-secret and accepted coup perpetrated by the military, does not discriminate on the basis of class, race, or ethnicity. If it sees a person as a threat to its own existence, it will kill that person, by way of either a public execution or straightforward murder.

The color of one's skin, the job a person holds, or the amount of money in one's bank account doesn't matter to this government. Everyone is equally disposable, as long as the militaristic government can maintain its stranglehold on power.

Franco gets to this point, though, in a particularly cruel and uncomfortably discriminatory way. His villains at the beginning of this story are the poor of Mexico City, who—for reasons that aren't explained and by methods that seem simultaneously chaotic and well-organized, as if to suggest something both feral and calculated, giving us two contradictory reasons to fear this group—are protesting, rioting, looting, and, eventually, robbing and murdering the wealthy of the city.

We know they're the villains in Franco's mind, because the first act of this story is seen from the perspective of one of those well-to-do families. They're celebrating a wedding between two children of wealth and influence. The wedding between Marianne (Naian González Norvind) and Alan (Darío Yazbek) could have been delayed, but this is as much a business venture for the families as it is a celebration of love. There are deals to be made and money to be exchanged before and after the ceremony.

The one thing that cannot be dismissed about Franco's movie is how well the filmmaker establishes and escalates the tension of this lengthy sequence. There are murmurs of what's happening outside the walls of the mansion where the wedding is being held. The news and late-arriving guests speak of increased looting, roads closed by the police, and protestors taking over freeways.

The mother (played by Lisa Owen) of the bride suspects that at least one person within the house is sympathetic to or part of the revolt, which incorporates green paint to claim victory or mark its targets. The faucet in a bathroom starts running green, and some of the guests have green splotches on their skin and clothes.

Marianne, quickly established as a good-hearted person, leaves her own wedding to try to help a former house worker, whose wife was kicked out of the hospital so the staff could tend to the wounded from the protests/riots. The older woman will die unless she receives surgery, but a private clinic is asking for a couple hundred thousand pesos. Marianne leaves with Cristian (Fernando Cuautle), the son of the family's loyal housekeeper Marta (Mónica Del Carmen), to help the couple.

Shortly after, a group of armed people climb the mansion walls, stealing from and murdering assorted people there. Franco, whose filmmaking technique and procedural plotting clearly display that he knows what he's doing, makes the distinct choice to racially/ethnically differentiate the attackers from the victims. Without any real understanding for or attempt to explain the causes for the uprising and the concerns of those participating in it, the whole sequence comes across as unfortunate, prejudicial fear-mongering on the filmmaker's part.

That is just the setup for the real plot, which sees Marianne abducted by a group of revolutionary militants or rogue military personnel (The fact that it's unclear only adds to the constant sense of confusion about Franco's political aims), who are holding the wealthy hostage for ransom money. Meanwhile, Alan and her brother Daniel (Diego Boneta) enlist the help of their families' government contacts to find her. As Marianne and her fellow captives are physically and sexually tortured (The whole subplot feels like a shallow heightening of the movie's earlier scare tactics), Cristian, Marta, and their relatives (the ones whom Marianne tried to help) are subjected to a dehumanizing series of humiliating policies (lots of checkpoints, government papers, being shuttled under supervision, and even being sprayed with sanitizer).

New Order does eventually arrive at a succinct and rather damning thesis—a nihilistic depiction of what those in power in this system are willing to do in order to maintain it and whom they will sacrifice for that goal. The short answer to the second part is everyone, but in the process of getting to that point, Franco's biases and tactics inherently damage his case.

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