Technically, the film has three core perspectives - that of the aforementioned Marianne’s travails as high-value prisoner of the new regime; that of two of her family’s workers, Marta and Cristian; and that of the surviving members of Marianne’s family, sheltering with other military, corporate, and political elites at a stable compound - but the latter two are nevertheless defined by the first, their minimal plots orbiting Marianne’s extortion after she’s separated from her wedding at the end of the first act. It is immediately notable what is missing here: New Order offers no point of identification with the revolutionaries, who are solely depicted as ransacking wild people. Beyond the love of lucre - the maid deliriously stripping the wedding’s coat rack and bedside tables - there is no sense of revolutionary elan, joy, or righteousness. To make matters worse, Marta and Cristian, who are the film’s only proxy for the non-militant working public, are passive objects in the plot: to the extent they do things, they ask for help, ferret around Marianne, and are a voiceless go-between for the revolutionary militia and the Novelo family as they attempt to negotiate a ransom.

The only sense of justification we get for the chaos is delivered through the presence of Rolando, a long-time ex-employee of the Novelos, who has come to borrow 200,000 pesos for the emergency heart transplant needed for his dying wife, Elisa. After pitiful attempts at philanthropy by her mother and brother, provoking Rolando’s departure, Marianne is determined to take him some of her wedding money, setting off with Cristian toward his house. (Cristian is, incidentally, Rolando’s nephew, in a Parasite-esque family tree of domestic servants.) The negligence with which Marianne’s family treat Rolando’s urgent request is a perfect depiction of capitalism’s warped priorities, the vacant imperative to ‘get back to the party’ here outweighing the immediate demand of human need, metonymic of the systemic privileging of obscene luxury over more direct use-values. But by the same token, Marianne’s decision to do the only morally defensible thing in the circumstances conjures an overinflated sympathy for her character that unravels the film’s initial critical footing.

This sequence of events serves to do two things. First, it separates Marianne from her family and thus inaugurates the central narrative problem of her kidnapping. Secondly, though, it also embodies the film’s cautionary tale: Marianne embodies the Good Bourgeoisie, those equipped, despite the odds, with a conscience, whose principled act is then derailed by the chaos of the revolution (she never ends up reaching Rolando, and both he and Elisa die). Marianne was too late to help Rolando, her family having palmed him off, the anger he symbolised exploding in the streets; just as Franco suggests it may be too late for the ruling class as a whole to discharge their humanist obligations in order to ward off a collapse of the status quo. The old trick of the protagonist as the directorial stand-in therefore appears here in a telling form.

In Mubi’s post-credits interview, Franco makes it clear that the fear the film articulates emerged from his own observations of neoliberalism’s morbid symptoms, lumping together right-wing extremism, the Yellow Vests, and Black Lives Matter protests as evidence of a disintegrating order. He is also clear that the causes of such symptoms lie in the massive concentration of wealth and its attendant perpetuation of needless human suffering. For him, the message of the film is clear: ‘we need to listen to people who are in need’ so as ‘to avoid extremes’. But it is precisely in this ‘we’ - ‘the upper class […] the ones who can change things,’ and who are ‘not doing that’ - and the imperative to avoid ‘extreme’ challenges to their order, that the limitations of New Order lie.

In Franco’s analysis, the agency of the poor is either non-existent - awaiting moral epiphany on the part of the global elite, ignoring precisely those mechanisms of accumulation that prohibit such kindness - or, when it exists, catastrophic, leading only to unstructured vengeance and eventual decomposition into authoritarian rule (either by military counter-coup, or by their own doing; New Order is, tellingly, not bothered with demarcating too strongly here between these two). Franco, of course, defends himself by assuring viewers that the film skewers ‘every part of society’ - ‘the military, the working class, the upper class’ - but in a world as polarised as ours, this cop-out does nothing but defend the established system. The nihilism noted by Western media outlets is thus expressive both of the jouissance of the cynical ‘one who knows’, and of the disavowal of the antagonisms, the washing one’s hands of a conflict that is non-negotiable, whether one knows it or not. It is significant in this respect that the film’s issues were not ignored by critics nor the general public in Mexico: it received condemnation from the executive director of a nationwide anti-racism organisation for its stereotypical depiction of the protesters, and as Arturo Magana Arce objects in Cine Premiere, the film’s pearl-clutching thematics ‘gives reason to those who judge people whom, in a desperate way, reclaim justice from the streets.’ Those with the most reason for a jaded realism, then - the victims of genuine violence from the imperial core and its national beneficiaries - are those, by the very same token, most liable to penetrate Franco’s reactionary approximation of it.