Cinematic Releases: New Order (2020) - Reviewed

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Courtesy of NEON
 
Mexican writer-producer-director-editor Michel Franco’s New Order, being released stateside by Neon, is the most horrendously violent, cruel and nastiest film to be released in theaters this year.  Already sparking a backlash in it’s own country over perceptions of racism stemming from the film’s trailer, this hard hitting and unrelenting drama thriller also went on to generate further controversy in the United States over the film’s level of violence and nihilistic, bleak outlook. 
 
Told in flashback, this science-fiction dystopian nightmare concerns one day in the wedding of wealthy light-skinned upper-class elites whose happy occasion is cut short by the arrival of darker-skinned lower class members of society who violently stage a coup d'é·tat, sparking the arrival of a military dictatorship which takes over the country with many, many of the film’s main characters brutalized before being murdered at point blank range.

Courtesy of NEON
 
From the growing leitmotifs of green paint appearing in sinks or windows (and in one particularly prophetic vista flowing like a river down a flight of stairs) alongside a hard-to-shake shot panning over naked bodies of men and women bloodied and/or sporting broken necks, New Order is deliberately and positively rotten to the core from start to finish.  The intention is to make a political statement about social tensions stemming from class division but the power is so strong it will likely spawn walkouts with the faint hearted.  Make no mistake, this is the hardest R rated movie of the year that somehow managed to escape an NC-17 for extreme ultraviolence.
 
A ’you-are-there’ experience with the camera as a nonjudgmental fly on the wall, Franco’s film is masterfully realized and staged, shot beautifully by Yves Cape, but as such is an extremely difficult picture to recommend.  At a time when moviegoers are just getting their cinematic feet wet again in a post-COVID-19 environment, a movie this magnificently unpleasant is the last thing anyone beaten down by these last two years will want to see.  Whether or not New Order is as ‘necessary’ as some of the critics have claimed, what it definitely is is brutally effective cinema.
 
If you haven’t bolted from the theater within the first five minutes of piles of corpses, New Order won’t get any easier as it presses onward towards a jet black finale with increasing ultraviolence and carnage spilling across the screen.  Some may complain the film abandons whatever characterizations it may have developed in the first half to unrelenting chaos and disorder, but as a filmgoer New Order, hard and heavy as it might be, was like being in the eye of a hurricane approaching, seemingly small from afar before hovering over you and unleashing its deadly winds. 

Courtesy of NEON
 
While the squeamish may be inclined to pass on this one, the daring and adventurous cinephile will nonetheless find much to chew on here for good or for ill.  Films this savagely, ruthlessly unmatched in their brutality only come around once in a great while.  Proceed with extreme caution as you might get hurt real badly.

--Andrew Kotwicki