New Order

Viewer advice: Contains high-impact sexual violence

Winner of the Silver Lion at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, this shocking, dystopian thriller is an incendiary indictment of class, racism and power that speaks to our times.

Plugging in directly to the global discontent of the moment, the latest provocation from Mexican-born, Cannes award-winning director Michel Franco (April’s Daughter, MIFF 2017; Chronic, MIFF 2015) pushes class war to its harrowing extreme. In Mexico City, oblivious one-percenters hold a posh wedding while a civil uprising rocks the metropolis, allowing the military to stage a coup and hold both rich and poor captive under their rule.

This vicious, vital film brings the simmering divisions that run rampant in society to a boil, using confronting, sometimes troubling scenes – images that may haunt even hardened Salò veterans – to attack the prejudiced systems and abuses of power that have galvanised today’s struggle for social justice. New Order is an unnerving, indelible vision of a future that may well just be around the corner.  

“Michel Franco’s dystopian howl is dynamic cinema which takes no prisoners.” – Screen Daily