Michel Franco’s film-making has always had an edge of cold steel; here again is his icy stab and lacerating chill. New Order is an ordeal nightmare, imagining a violent uprising against Mexico’s super-rich. Connoisseurs of highbrow arthouse shock will note the fact that the film’s titles and credits, with the letter E in reverse, show the influence of France’s adulte terrible Gaspar Noé.
For decades, this has been the kind of provocative cinema that has faced opposition only in the easily ignored (and maybe secretly welcomed) outrage of conservative print media, but Franco has ironically faced his own uprising from online offence culture in Mexico when the trailer’s depiction of vengeful darker-skinned revolutionaries was condemned as racist. Franco wound up having to offer an apology after mishandling the response and claiming his film was suffering reverse racism targeted at what he inelegantly called the “whitexican”. It was an object lesson in how the “discourse” cannot absorb complexity or nuance.
The scene is a society wedding attended by the 1% elite in the grandest part of Mexico City, attended by corrupt politicians and business people, with their lazy, dissolute twentysomething children ordering about the darker-skinned servants. As in The Godfather, the wedding is to be an arena for a theatrical display of power – but not in the way intended by the father of the bride. Because a weird frisson of unease eddies about the party; there are chaotic protests in other parts of town. Guests have been jostled on their way to the house. Activists are splashing green paint everywhere: their signature touch. The mother of the bride is quietly freaked out when the tap water briefly runs green. Is this a poisoning of their water supply, or a supernatural visitation?
Bride-to-be Marianne (Naian González Norvind) is upset when a former servant comes to the door begging for money to pay for his wife’s operation: the menfolk are coldly irritated by this, but soft-hearted Marianne and her mother collect some cash and she actually leaves their compound with a servant Cristian (Fernando Cuautle) in the car, braving the disorder in the streets, intending to see to this matter personally. It means that she is spared the horror when her family home is overrun by armed protesters, but she is to face a nightmare of her own. The revolution has been taken over, or possibly run from the outset, by cynical, sadistic and corrupt military factions rounding up wealthy people, demanding ransoms and carrying out unspeakable sexual torture.
New Order is made with confrontational severity and technique; like, say, Michael Haneke’s Funny Games or Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama, we are certainly not offered the essentially risk-free entertainment of a thriller. This is a brutality that we have no choice but to live through, minute-by-minute, moment-by-moment, with each turn of the screw worse than the last. There are no emollient moments, no sympathetic touches, no redemptive characters, and the movie arrives at an almost nauseous climax of injustice, cynicism and cruelty.
And what is to be made of it all? On the most basic level, it is a warning of what inequality can cause in the future and what it is effectively causing right now. Perhaps there is something nihilistic here, but New Order very effectively persuades you that a real-life revolution might well be every bit as ugly, horrifying and un-Hollywood as this shows – and that it is on the way.
• New Order is released on 13 August in cinemas.
