2033: A deadly virus has killed off most of humankind, a virus so
obscure that nobody really knows what it might be. There are people who
are for whatever reason immune though ... so an eminent scientist collects
five of them - Thomas (David Wurawa), Alice (Margherita Remotti), Robert
(James Kelly), Mark (Federico Rossi) and Betty (Tatiana Luter) - and
pretty much hides them away in a cabin in the woods where they are
monitored 24/7 by in-built devices. However, the scientist falls into a
coma eventually, and his colleague professor Van Morgen (Franco Nero)
continues where he has left off - but the more Van Morgen decides to make
sense of it, the less he seems to be able to. Meanwhile at the cabin,
not everything goes as alright as it should, as its five inhabitants
increasingly get on one another's nerves. Then one of them, Robert, dies
in a hunting accident, which seriously hurts group dynamics - and
especially Betty is heart-broken because she was kind of in love with
Robert. What's worse though is that all groupmembers seem to start seeing
paranormal apparitions, and develop ESP abilities. This is too much for
Betty, who eventually kills herself. Mark in the meantime has really lost
his marbles, and now he wants to rape Alice - which leads to a three-way
fight between him, Alice and Thomas, who has long been in (unrequited)
love with Alice. Professor Van Morgen realizes he has to intervene, also
because he starts to suspect his comatose colleague's experiments are the
very cause for his test subjects' behaviour. What he finds out though when
he arrives at the cabin in the woods is beyond even his comprehension ... Even
if some of the concepts presented in New Order are a bit on the
esoteric side and might not be to everybody's liking, beneath everything
else this is a tight little thriller, taking full advantage of its limited
sets and small cast, and relying much less on action and special effects
than atmosphere and good old-fashioned suspense. So whatever you may think
about some of the film's ideas, at heart it's an amazingly tense thriller. Recommended.
|