Australian director Justin Kurzel’s taut and rugged true crime drama The Order takes place in the dusty past but stays in direct conversation with our troubled present. A grim and disturbing origin story for the modern white supremacist movement in the United States, its considerable power comes from Kurzel’s flat and affectless style that plays its cards straight-up without artificially inflating the drama or indulging our desire for over-the-top shoot-’em-up excitement. Kurzel stays true to his aesthetic even when guiding his actors, as a never-better Jude Law effectively undersells his performance as FBI agent Terry Husk, whose investigation into a series of Idaho robberies in 1983 uncovers an Aryan Nation splinter group with designs for a race war.
The group, known as The Order, is led by Bob Mathews, who is played by Nicholas Hoult with an understanding that charisma in a cult leader will get you further than anger ever will. If a movie like this is only as good as its villain, then Hoult’s steely and focused portrayal of Mathews helps make The Order very good indeed. Mathews offers his followers a sense of family and community while also inspiring them to rob banks and armored cars to fund their revolution. Husk and Mathews are two sides of the same coin, both obsessive in achieving their goals to the detriment of their respective families.
In comparing Mathews’ own family — including a wife and a mistress — with his growing family of disaffected followers, Kurzel gives him a dramatically legitimate, if misguided, motivation that provides a solid thematic foundation. Even with that, Kurzel still delivers a riveting and ominously prescient procedural with an authenticity that demands our full engagement. It forces us to draw modern-day parallels to a hate-fueled movement that the FBI was able to slow down but not stop.
In ‘The Order,’ Violence and Hatred Come Disguised as Family
In 1983, an Idaho-based FBI agent spots a pattern in recent bank robberies, counterfeiting operations and armored car heists terrorizing communities across the Pacific Northwest. He sets out to prove it is not the work of a traditional organized crime unit, but a radical group with a charismatic leader Bob Mathews.
- Release Date
- December 5, 2024
- Cast
- Marc Maron , George Tchortov , Daniel Yip , Daniel Doheny , Sebastian Pigott , Jude Law , John Warkentin , Nicholas Hoult , Phillip Forest Lewitski , Vanessa Holmes , Bryan J. McHale , Rae Farrer , Carter Morrison , Odessa Young , Tye Sheridan , Philip Granger , Ryan Chandoul Wesley , Morgan Holmstrom , Bradley Stryker , Alison Oliver , Huxley Fisher , Jurnee Smollett , Randy Fisher , Geena Meszaros , Sean Tyler Foley , Victor Slezak , Matias Lucas , Sarah Haggeman , Dayna Lea Hoffman , Lenore Stillwell , Jason Long , Reid Fisher , Jerod Blake , Paul Wood , Shawn Markwardt , Judith Buchan , David LeReaney , Sally Bishop , Stafford Perry , Chantal Perron
- Runtime
- 120 Minutes
- The film takes place in the 1980s but feels like it could happen today.
- It’s a somber, yet riveting account that avoids FBI thriller cliches.
- Jude Law has never been better.
- Jude Law’s backstory is fairly unimaginative.
Kurzel has carved out quite a niche creating films that chart, with near forensic levels of psychological detail, the violent trajectories of dangerous men. The Order can be viewed as an America-focused extension of his previous film, Nitram, about the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania that killed 35 people. Both films argue that the seeds of violence don’t sprout quickly but rather need the right kind of acrid soil and fetid, dirty water to find full flower. Zach Baylin’s screenplay (based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s 1989 non-fiction book, The Silent Brotherhood) is most effective in charting Mathews’ ascendance during moments that manage to disturb without a single shot being fired.
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In one crucial scene, Mathews meets Aryan Nation founder Richard Butler (Victor Slezak) on a deserted road. In advancing his white supremacist cause, Butler prefers to play the long game, confident that “in 10 years we’ll have members in the Congress, the Senate — that’s how you make change.” The fact that Butler is ultimately right lands as a bullet in the heart of every 2024 viewer of The Order.
But in 1983, it’s Mathews whose call for immediate and violent action will rouse his racist flock. Such violence arguably culminated in the 1984 murder of Jewish radio host Alan Berg (played here by a perfectly cast Marc Maron). Berg is the only character to openly question and criticize Mathews’ group and since, stop us if this sounds familiar, those in power will do anything to keep contrary views from sullying the ears of the faithful, Berg’s death seemed inevitable here and in real life.
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Counterfeit Bills and Bank Robberies Are Only the Beginning
Only the dogged Husk stands between Mathews and the race war inspired by The Turner Diaries, William Luther Pierce’s racist 1978 instruction manual about a government overthrow and the wholesale murder of Jews and non-whites. When we meet Husk, he’s emotionally and physically spent from too many years in New York chasing down the KKK and the Cosa Nostra. He agrees to relocate to an empty FBI office in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to slow down and hopefully entice his estranged wife and daughters to join him in the Pacific Northwest.
If that sounds a bit tired as backstories go, it is. But Law infuses the character with a downcast, world-weary professionalism that will soon make him a crucial finger in the dam of a white nationalist wave that we know is destined to hobble the America Experiment.
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Husk’s arrival coincides with a string of porn theater bombings and bank robberies in the area. While the local sheriff is none too helpful, Deputy Bowen (Tye Sheridan, finally shedding his youth for something more interesting) knows that Aryan Nation pamphlets aren’t the only things that Mathews’ clan is printing. They’re also counterfeiting bills, although to what end, no one is sure. When Husk and Bowen find the bullet-riddled body of the snitch who told Bowen about the counterfeit bills, FBI honcho Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett) joins the duo to try and tie the loose threads together.
‘The Order’ Is One of the Better Films of 2024
Kurzel and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw often frame characters against vast and empty plains that, when paired with composer Jed Kurzel’s effectively somber score, create a chillingly naturalistic effect. Even the action scenes, including a shoot-out in a Sears parking lot and a robbery of an armored car in broad daylight, are depicted with an almost newsreel-like lack of flash.
Kurzel’s control of the narrative, the performances, and the visual style is complete. He never allows us respite from his grip, not even after the film’s fiery climax. That’s because, in a sense, The Order never actually ends. It merely jumps from Kurzel’s grimly compelling hands onto the pages of history both printed and yet to be written. The Order, distributed by Vertical, will be released in limited theaters on December 6.