Michel Franco

(On Cable TV, September 2022) It’s appropriate for a film about a populist revolution to have bourgeois viewers unsettled. But this can be overdone. Falling into a few common dystopian storytelling traps, New Order starts out promisingly, yet disintegrates to meaningless, unlikable garbage by its conclusion. It’s intriguing in its first half-hour, as an upper-class wedding reception in Mexico City goes forward even as the rumble of a violent populist uprising becomes louder and louder. An ensemble cast of characters is quickly introduced, sketched and confronted with a murderous revolution that quickly reaches into what should have been a safe place. By the time the servants drive their former masters against the wall, it’s clear that New Order is not going to be a pleasant experience. Not all of the rich characters are heartless, but that doesn’t make much of a difference when the first culling is one of indiscriminate rage. But then the film goes off the rails in many ways. The first being an inability to keep a handle on the outwardly expanding scope of the story—as most Science Fiction writers understand, the way to write about society-altering events is to find characters able to witness the events and suffer from them. But New Order doesn’t have this discipline—it expands upwards to the ministers trying to keep a handle on the situation, sideways on the revolutionaries turning mercenary, and not at all on the characters introduced in the first half-hour. It makes for an increasingly remote film with no one to root for, a problem compounded exponentially by a nihilistic attitude that kills off nearly everyone by the time the film wraps up. It makes New Order curiously conservative—the popular uprising becoming a horror scenario that should have been wiped out early by all means necessary. Writer-director-producer Michel Franco’s regrettable intention to additionally turn New Order into an artistic film (most notably via non-chronological flashes of slow-motion events) pales in comparison to its narrative problems. This leaves a lot of potential on the table for a cogent depiction of class warfare, or even in showing why violent revolution will fail in its aims when compared to peaceful incremental change. As the world teeters ever closer to violent populist uprisings, New Order fails to engage with the danger of where things may be headed, minimizes the real inequity factors leading to such anger, and wastes its assets into something that means almost nothing.