Jude Law takes on neo-Nazis in true-crime thriller ‘The Order’
“The Order” — 3 stars
At the start of Justin Kurzel’s gripping, finely acted “The Order,” before a single image appears, we hear the voice of actor Marc Maron, hero to the podcast generation, tangling with a virulent antisemitic caller over the airwaves. For a second, you almost wonder what year it is. The exchange is chilling, the point quickly made: America’s past is not so distant or distinguishable from its present, in all the worst ways.
Kurzel’s films include the bleak “Snowtown” (2011), about shocking murders that rocked his native Australia in the 1990s, and 2021’s grim “Nitram,” profiling the shooter behind the country’s 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Here, he delivers another warning in the form of a timely American crime story — one that, arriving in theaters a month after the U.S. election, many will deem too late.
It’s 1983, and Maron is portraying the Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg, who would be assassinated by neo-Nazis within a year. But it’s grizzled FBI veteran Terry Husk (Jude Law) we follow as he moseys into a seemingly quaint Idaho town to take over a quiet, one-man bureau, a forced slowdown after years spent obsessively hunting the mob and the KKK to the detriment of his marriage, health and personal hygiene.
But Terry is too addicted to the hunt, Law’s hypervigilant eyes tracking everything he sees as if straining to piece together a never-ending puzzle. He pops pills that give him nosebleeds. His family life is in shambles. Before long, he’s clocking white supremacist recruitment fliers around town; tracking robberies and bombings across the state border in Washington; and anointing an idealistic local sheriff’s deputy, Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), as his unofficial protégé to help him obsessively connect the dots. He doesn’t yet know it, but his quarry is closer than he suspects.
In a 180-degree turn from his role in another film due out this month, “Nosferatu,” Nicholas Hoult projects icy confidence as Bob Mathews, head of a white supremacist terrorist cell so extreme, they’ve splintered off from the militant Christian hate group Aryan Nations. That group’s leader, Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), has a plan to amass political power (“In 10 years, we’ll have members in the Congress,” he vows), but the younger Mathews and his cadre of bigoted thugs (played with menace by George Tchortov, Phillip Forest Lewitski and Sebastian Pigott) want action now. So do the disaffected men Mathews easily recruits with racist and xenophobic promises of economic security and brotherhood.
Adapted by Zach Baylin (“King Richard”) into a good vs. evil neo-western from Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s nonfiction book “The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground,” the script invents its heroes, including the fictional Husk, Bowen and Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett), an FBI colleague who joins the mission to take Mathews down. But the details drawn from real life — including how the 1978 white nationalist dystopian novel “The Turner Diaries” provided a blueprint for armed revolution to the Order and influenced the Oklahoma City bombing and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — paint a sobering picture of how ideologies like Mathews’ are sown and spread.
Kurzel sets his cop and robber on a bloody “Heat”-esque collision course, re-creating Mathews’ real-life attacks with propulsive immediacy. Brother Jed Kurzel’s panting, pulse-pounding score cranks up the pressure as Husk and Mathews draw closer to a final confrontation, while cinematographer and frequent collaborator Adam Arkapaw (“True Detective,” “Top of the Lake”) captures gorgeous mountain landscapes and shadowy nighttime sieges alike in muted oranges and blues that lend the movie a mythical patina.
Law, also a producer, wears Husk’s crushing failures with a dogged weariness. Hoult — charismatic, manipulative, his gaze intense and unblinking — mines Mathews for complexity, adding dimension in glimpses of his home life with his devoted but suffering wife, Debbie Mathews (Alison Oliver), and pregnant mistress Zillah Craig (Odessa Young). But the suggestion that Husk and Mathews are two sides of the same fanatical coin linked by a preternatural understanding wobbles in translation from actual history to artsy interpretation, and a recurring bit involving Husk’s big-game hobby doesn’t land with the aimed-for lyrical profundity.
Humanizing Mathews isn’t meant to let him even an inch off the hook, however; it reminds us that he is human, as are the terrorists who came before him and those who may follow. In his final stand, he acknowledges that the notoriety of his cause will outlive him. The real horror at the heart of “The Order” is in realizing he’s right.
• • •
Rated R for bloody violence, language, racist and antisemitic slurs, and acts of domestic terrorism. 114 minutes.