New Order: Depiction of Brutal Class Divide Propels Grim Mexican Thriller
By Kim Hughes
Rating: A
It is at times a terrifically uncomfortable movie to watch. But director Michel Franco's New Order, a searing and relentlessly grim indictment of class division and government corruption, scans not only as possible but entirely likely given our current world. Heavy doesn’t begin to describe it.
The film opens on Marianne’s wedding day, and while she and her groom Alan (Dario Yazbek Bernal, Gael García’s brother) and their families toast the pending nuptials in their posh home in the exclusive El Pedregal neighbourhood of Mexico City, fierce protests rage in the streets.
A former servant of the family comes seeking money for his ill wife. Marianne’s mother manages to gather 35,000 pesos from the assembled throng, an impressive haul for an impromptu passing of the hat, which further underscores the wealth of the wedding guests. But it’s not enough.
Kindly Marianne (Naian González Norvind), feeling obliged to help more but unaware of the mayhem unfolding in the streets outside her idyllic home, sets off to visit the sick woman, planning to return before her vows are to be exchanged. Not to be.
Quickly ensnared in the protests, Marianne — and others seen as easy targets — is kidnapped by the military, who attempt to ransom victims back to their families while framing the anti-poverty, anti-government protesters for their misdeeds.
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Marianne and her fellow kidnap victims are imprisoned and subject to indignities and horrors that include (but are not limited to) enforced nudity, cold group showers, and rape. Please accept this as a trigger warning for that scene. Meanwhile, the family home is being trashed by intruders. It’s no spoiler to say that absolutely nothing ends well for anyone.
A festival hit from last fall — it played TIFF and the Venice Film Festival where it won Silver Lion — New Order bills itself as a dystopian tale though its creation pre-pandemic and arrival post-pandemic adds an eerie layer to its already disturbing surface.
Mexico is among the hardest-hit nations of the virus and the government’s lethargic-to-woeful response is precisely the kind of fire able to fuel broiling resentment among both citizenry and rank-and-file military that, left unchecked, could escalate to the extremes depicted here.
Franco couldn’t have known that at the time, of course. But his powerful movie gathers ominous strength as a result.
New Order. Directed by Michel Franco. Starring Naian González Norvind, Fernando Cuautle, Diego Boneta and Dario Yazbek Bernal. In select theatres and available on demand beginning June 11.