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A near-future dystopia that navigates a fractured society hours away from collapse, Michel Franco ’s “New Order” is a relentless and blood-soaked study of social injustice, gripping to watch despite its graphic and escalating brutality. Sadly, it’s also one that only vaguely engages with the need for prosperity for all. That imprecision is so intense that often times you wonder what exactly it is that Franco’s film mutters about the universal topic of class warfare and whether the writer/director is actually saying what he intends to say about this ever urgent subject matter, amid some on-the-nose symbolism, and various exploitative images of piling corpses.

Not that films or filmmakers have a duty to prescribe a clear-cut and perfect ethical code to the viewers and package it with a pretty bow—there is value in leaving the final judgment to the educated eye of the beholder. The problem with “New Order” isn’t so much its decisive sense of objectivity or amorality, but rather, its stubbornness to pursue the perspective of the oppressor, while carelessly implying, “there are good and bad people on both sides.” It is entirely likely that “New Order” actually wishes to align itself with something like Bong Joon Ho’s “ Parasite ,” a masterwork that dissects the bloodsucking evil that is societal economic disparity with ingenious thematic and stylistic assurance. But perhaps unintentionally, it treads closer to, of all things, Christopher Nolan ’s “ The Dark Knight Rises .” While Nolan’s Batman chapter that sees the uprising of the financially oppressed deserves all the credit for noticing something impending in the air (the film was conceived pre-Occupy Wall Street, but released during it), it left a confounding message behind by looking for its heroes in the wrong place, among the wealthier ranks.

This is more or less what Franco does with “New Order” over approximately 90 nail-biting minutes that tell a fictional tale of a coup d'état somewhere in Mexico. It all starts rather abstractly with the shot of a suggestive painting and a naked body splashed with green paint that in unison scream wealth and money. The sequence that follows confirms the insinuation. We are on the grounds of a handsome, upper-class estate of an obviously well-off family. They are celebrating the marriage of their daughter Marianne ( Naian González Norvind ) to the successful Alan (Darío Yazbek Bernal) with a classy affair outpouring with stylishly attired guests.

When he shows up uninvited at the house, Rolando ( Eligio Meléndez ), a former, trusted long-time employee of the family, looks nothing like the flashy guests. He humbly speaks with the matriarch Rebeca ( Lisa Owen ) first, who is already distressed because of some inexplicable green water coming out of the bathroom sink and doesn’t seem to have that much time for Rolando’s life-and-death predicament. Still, the old man swallows his pride and asks for a large sum of money for his wife’s heart surgery. He explains that it is taking place at a private and expensive hospital after he had to transfer her due to violent protests all around the city. (Are we supposed to blame the protestors here? It’s unclear.) Rebeca brushes him off with only a fraction of what he needs, and so does Marianne’s brother Daniel ( Diego Boneta ). When Marianne, who deeply respects Rolando, learns about the situation, she decides to give him her monetary wedding gifts, but gets told off both by her father Ivan (Roberto Medina) who has connections to the military and husband-to-be. “It’s your wedding day, just enjoy,” everyone advises. Except, the celebrations predictably come to a halt once the protests in the streets seep into the property in the most violent way, while Marianne heads out with loyal housekeeper Marta’s ( Mónica del Carmen ) son Christian ( Fernando Cuautle ) to find Rolando and pay for the medical emergency.

The city-wide situation escalates, nearly erasing the class divide once the military authoritarianism and governmental corruption seize their opportunity. What follows—instances of mass murder, sexual assault, utter cruelty and a mounting body count that Franco seems dangerously pleased to put on display—is hard to watch, even though it is absorbing, impressively sure-handed filmmaking. Throughout the movie’s taut running time, Franco shows, above all else, what a master craftsman he is, with his camera cleanly and confidently charting a time of social and political unrest with startling scale and scope. But somewhere along the way, especially when he decides to make the rich Marianne with the heart of gold the main interest of the story (while leaving most people on the opposite side of the social order anonymous), he loses his handle on the compass. Or maybe he never had that much of a direction to speak of.

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Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

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New Order (2021)

Naian González Norvind as Marianne

Diego Boneta as Daniel

Dario Yazbek Bernal as Alan

Mónica del Carmen as Marta

Eligio Meléndez as Rolando

Patricia Bernal as Pilar

Claudia Lobo as Tamara

Eduardo Victoria as Reynaldo

Xavier Cervantes as Marcos

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The Best Movies category awards the best-reviewed film regardless of their release, whether they went straight to streaming or swung onto the silver screen. Spider-Man: No Way Home became the mega-cultural event that would entice moviegoers back into theaters, and it lived up to the hype for critics, as well. It was a music-filled year with In the Heights , West Side Story , and Summer of Soul . On the heavy side, some big tomatoes for Pig and a career-best Nicolas Cage, Jane Campion’s first-in-11-years The Power of the Dog , and A Quiet Place Part II , everyone’s collective exhalation through horror. Meanwhile, Raya and the Last Dragon , The Mitchells vs the Machines , and Coda brought representative, progressive ingredients to family storytelling.

The order reflects Tomatometer scores (as of December 31, 2021) after adjustment from our ranking formula, which compensates for variation in the number of reviews when comparing movies or TV shows.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) 93%

In the Heights (2021) 94%

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021) 99%

Pig (2021) 97%

The Power of the Dog (2021) 94%

CODA (2021) 94%

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) 93%

West Side Story (2021) 92%

A Quiet Place Part II (2021) 91%

The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) 97%

The Suicide Squad (2021) 90%

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) 91%

Shiva Baby (2020) 97%

The Velvet Underground (2021) 98%

The Truffle Hunters (2020) 97%

Quo vadis, aida (2020) 100%.

Luca (2021) 91%

Slalom (2020) 100%

Drive My Car (2021) 97%

Coded Bias (2020) 100%

The Sparks Brothers (2021) 95%

Parallel Mothers (2021) 96%

The Lost Daughter (2021) 94%

Mayor (2020) 100%

Two of Us (2019) 98%

Mass (2021) 95%

Luzzu (2021) 98%

Changing the Game (2019) 100%

Acasa, My Home (2020) 100%

Sabaya (2021) 100%

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‘New Order’ Review: A Revolutionary Nightmare or a Recurring Dream?

The Mexican director Michel Franco delivers a harsh film that doubles back on itself, inverting assumptions about the forces at play.

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By Glenn Kenny

The Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco frequently devises narrative puzzles that hinge on unusual and emotionally fraught moral and ethical dilemmas. They’re usually on an intimate scale, as in his 2016 medical drama “Chronic.” His latest film, “New Order,” which created a sensation at home and on the festival circuit , takes a contained approach to a big event: insurrection.

An opening montage, featuring many shots that will recur throughout the narrative, is practically surreal, flashing images of destruction and splatters of green liquid. The movie settles in on a lavish Mexico City home where family and friends are celebrating the coming wedding of Marianne ( Naian González Norvind ). As she and her moneyed fiancé frolic with the guests, disturbances from the outside start oozing in.

Soon the house is invaded by violent looters in face paint. The sight of what appear to be Indigenous people ripping the jewelry from the wealthy white guests plays out like Tucker Carlson’s worst nightmare. All this feels deeply, schematically reactionary on Franco’s part.

But his ultimate vision, which reveals itself in a series of shocking story turns, is bleaker and more acidic than you may have guessed. Along the way, Marianne is kidnapped and subjected to prison depredations that recall the exploitation work of another Franco, the Spanish director, Jess . These and other scenes are meant to be hard to watch, and they are.

The plot corkscrews into a parable of fascism via a “don’t let a crisis go to waste” philosophy. Franco practically dares the viewer to call his conclusion far-fetched. And for better or worse, the director’s dynamic filmmaking makes some of his projections stick.

New Order Rated R for graphic violence, language. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.

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New Order Reviews

Instead of being suggestive and sticking to entertainment, this film is dark and is more focused on telling the truth and showing it all.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Feb 29, 2024

By the time Franco joins together strands that the audience will most likely have seen coming, New Order grinds to a halt.

Full Review | Feb 7, 2024

There are no sympathetic or redeeming characters, the politics is very muddled and any message it wishes to convey is drowned out by the violence. New Order is a short, sharp shock to the system. Albeit a deeply unpleasant one with no redeeming features.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Nov 12, 2022

Its dystopian treatise questions the inequality margin between the social classes that make up present-day Mexican society, but I am afraid that its exercise never escapes tautological inertia or first-order aesthetic pretensions. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Sep 14, 2022

If you can approach the film with an open mind (and a strong stomach), you’ll find a movie willing to confront the way many people think about things today.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2022

Above all else, New Order is provocative. In this brilliant and disturbing dystopian thriller, no one wins as the world crashes around them all, rich and poor. New Order is a film that won’t be easy to shake off.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 20, 2022

At a time when the divide between classes is increasingly pronounced, this thriller explores a gripping, albeit gory, possibility of class warfare. Visually, New Order is slick and rich, the performances honest and gripping.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 3, 2022

When so much of today's cinema comes with a shrug of familiarity, New Order feels like something you cannot ignore.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 12, 2022

New Order is a bold film that will continue to divide viewers and critics alike, but ultimately, if it forces more discourse on the vast and growing disparity between the rich and the poor, maybe that's exactly as Franco intended.

Full Review | Sep 30, 2021

A Great and Important Ride

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 5, 2021

As much as New Order wants to warn audiences how easily a society can turn into a corrupt, fascist dictatorship, he needn't have bothered. A lot of us... already got the gist.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Aug 27, 2021

His film is a hard watch, unflinchingly bleak, but may have something important to say.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 13, 2021

A fascinating, stylish, uncompromising thriller for all its repugnant prejudices: punk rock movie-making for the ruling elite.

The storyline is meant as fierce social commentary, but it's just a vacuous show of pessimism.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 12, 2021

It is possible to depict power's fluid indefatigability with nuance, care and humanity, but in the case of New Order, complexity and a fearless examination of political violence are eschewed in favour of exploitation and nihilism.

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 11, 2021

It's a film that feels like a feverish fantasy while also hitting dangerously close to home in a world ravaged by class differences, a global health crisis and the rise of the far right.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Aug 10, 2021

The refusal of hope is offset by a lack of platitudes, making this an antidote to complacency.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 9, 2021

The expertly calibrated sound design is a character in its own right, manifesting the rebellion in snatches of background radio chatter and small-talk asides before bringing it ear-splittingly into the foreground. The actors are very good too...

Full Review | Jul 12, 2021

The three stories are heart-wrenching.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 26, 2021

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New Order review – a brutally unforgiving attack on Mexico’s super-rich

Michel Franco leaves no room for sympathy or redemption in this violent, cynical thriller, a vivid warning against the consequences of inequality

M ichel 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.

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‘New Order’ Review: Upsetting Art-House Thriller Frames a Fictional Uprising From the Perspective of the 1%

Mexican director Michel Franco taps into the unrest being felt worldwide with this confrontational and deeply cynical look at how a revolution might play out.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Mexican director Michel Franco ’s latest, dystopian shock drama “ New Order ,” proves to be the most punishing entry in a difficult oeuvre, which may sound harsh but isn’t meant as an insult.

A cold and sometimes overly intellectual filmmaker, Franco knows how to make an audience squirm. That’s part of the bargain when we buy a ticket to one of his movies. In “After Lucia,” he asked viewers — trapped in their seats, helpless to intervene — to observe a vulnerable teen’s life go off the rails after a video of her having drunken sex went viral. In “Chronic,” he spotlighted the emotional burden society heaps upon hospice nurses, with tragic results.

But how many people actually saw these films? Now, in Franco’s sixth feature, the director demands the public’s attention, launching a full-on assault on our collective comfort zone while doubling down on the very thing that makes his films unwatchable for so many. Moviegoing is, by its nature, an act of empathy, as we invest in the lives of fictional strangers, trusting the narrative to repay our emotional commitment — and yet, in film after film, Franco challenges that assumption. Perversely, for those who’ve now come to expect that from him, “New Order” doesn’t disappoint.

Inspired by waves of civil unrest sweeping the globe, this ambitious exercise imagines how such a people’s revolution might manifest if it hit Mexico City, and in so doing, it both anticipates and amplifies the protests that have been taking place around the world in recent months. That makes “New Order” incredibly timely but also uniquely upsetting, since it feels theoretical at a moment when entire societies are expressing real pain. Essentially picking up where “The Joker” left off, this ultra-provocative case of speculative fiction promises a view of what change might look like, only to succumb to a deep sense of cynicism as the scope of the film becomes unmanageable.

“New Order” focuses on a wealthy white family caught up in the middle of a violent coup. After a short, surreal montage of the carnage to come — pandemonium in a hospital, corpses smeared in bright green paint and garish red blood (those colors a perversion of the Mexican flag) — Franco shifts his attention to a private wedding ceremony. These festivities are being held within the walled confines of a well-connected businessman’s home. His daughter Marianne (Naian González Norvind) has just been married, which distracts the family from the protests happening outside.

Still, there are small, uneasy indicators that this happy event may be out of sync with the national mood — like, say, house parties during a pandemic, or fall film festivals while so much of the world remains on lockdown. Marianne’s mother turns on her bathroom faucet, and the water runs green. A guest arrives splattered in paint, attacked en route by the mob. A beloved (if semi-forgotten) former employee named Rolando (Eligio Meléndez) shows up at the door, begging financial assistance for his wife, who needs an operation.

These intrusions undercut the relatively decadent mood, although only Marianne seems to prioritize them above her own party — which says a lot about her character but may also be Franco’s way of rigging how we feel toward the entire group. Many will not survive the movie, shot by demonstrators in the blunt, often senseless acts of violence that follow. As audiences, we typically expect that movie deaths should be meaningful, or at least somewhat dignified, but Franco (who models many of his stylistic choices on that most austere of auteurs, Michael Haneke) denies us that satisfaction.

Once the protesters cross the threshold of the home, there are no assurances. Although Franco may have invested half an hour in observing the revelers, nearly all white, they’re little more than symbols of oppression to the intruders, who are mostly native/indigenous in a deliberate statement about the color divisions in Mexican culture. These early scenes are terrifying — and totally convincing — in their frigidity, although Franco has introduced the family members in such a way that we may feel some “deserve” what’s coming to them more than others. Marianne has been fortunate in that she was touched by Rolando’s situation, leaving the party with his nephew Cristian (Fernando Cuautle) before the bloody home invasion. She sincerely wants to assist Rolando’s wife, and that show of kindness ought to protect her as the pair try to make their way through the turmoil unfolding outside.

Until now, Franco has worked on a relatively intimate scale, and it seems as if here he may not be equipped to depict the sheer magnitude of the uprising, but he surprises us once the film’s point of view leaves the house: Police blockades and radio broadcasts suggest what’s happening, and then suddenly, in a series of shocking tableaux, he reveals the extent of the looting.

Imagine the scene of the Corpus Christi massacre in “Roma” — the student demonstrations that start in the streets before forcing their way into the center of the frame as the family is shopping for a crib — expanded to feature length, and it will give you some idea of how it feels to watch “New Order.” The story begins within the sphere of the family but is ruptured by the protests, and in the second half, with the world turned upside down, Franco ventures into completely unprecedented terrain. Politically speaking, this is the most incendiary part of the film, and by far the most unpleasant, as Marianne is captured by revolutionaries, abused and ransomed in a stretch that implies that the “new order” of the film’s title is even more corrupt than the last.

This is where the mercifully short film loses its way, descending into “Salò”-like nastiness — including but by no means limited to a scene of a detainee being sodomized with a cattle prod — as Franco shares his vision of human depravity. As in the attack on Marianne’s family, sound effects fill in the horrors the director withholds from view.

Bleak as his worldview may be, Franco has always respected the audience’s intelligence, and here, he must be aware that our allegiances may well be with the protesters, not a one of whom is treated like a fully realized character. Given the way such demonstrations have actually unfolded of late — whether it’s the Black Lives Matter marches in the U.S., the Yellow Vests in France or pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong — it’s an incongruous and somewhat infuriating choice to depict the Mexican equivalent from the point of view of the 1%, framed to exploit the fear of those in power.

Reviewed online, Los Angeles, Sept. 10, 2020. (In Venice, Toronto, San Sebastián film festivals.) Running time: 85 MIN. (Original title: “Nuevo Orden”)

• Production: (Mexico-France) A Teorema, Les Films d'Ici production. (Int'l sales: The Match Factory, Cologne.) Producers: Michel Franco, Eréndira Núñez Larios, Cristina Velasco. Executive producers: Lorenzo Vigas, Diego Boneta, Cecilia Franco, Charles Barthe.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Michel Franco. Camera: Yves Cape. Editors: Oscar Figueroa Jara, Michel Franco.
• With: Naian González Norvind, Diego Boneta, Mónica del Carmen, Fernando Cuautle, Eligio Meléndez, Darío Yazbek.

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