Masculinity on the downswing meets white supremacism on the up in The Order, a typically unsettling film by Justin Kurzel, who’s never quite topped his devastating debut, Snowtown, though this comes pretty close.
The casting is unusual for something set in redneck USA. Nice, pretty Nicholas Hoult as Bob Mathews, head of a white-power outfit that’s broken away from a parent group of Nazis because it wasn’t extreme enough. And nice, diffident fellow Brit Jude Law as FBI cop Terry Husk, whose hopes of a quiet life on a new posting in Idaho are dashed when he realises he’s tangling with guys who are planning the overthrow of the US government.
Both are astonishingly good in roles you wouldn’t have pegged them for. Behind their performances, and behind the plot of this film, lie two books. First, the non-fiction work The Silent Brotherhood, by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, an investigation into the machinations of supremacist militia outfits in the USA in the 1980s. Also The Turner Diaries, the 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce, which has acted as a playbook for the likes of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the murderers of Jewish talk radio DJ Alan Berg and the attackers who stormed the Capitol in January 2021.
Berg opens the movie, played by Marc Maron in full flow, confronting a caller spouting some guff about Jews drinking the blood of babies. But the movie then shifts into a familiar cat-and-mouse between moustachioed Husk, who becomes increasingly convinced that the string of killings, robberies and bombings he’s investigating are part of a bigger plan. And rabble-rousing white supremacist Mathews, who believes the time for speeches is over and the time for action has come and so has formed this group, The Order, to build up a war chest and start a revolution.
Kurzel shoots it like it was a pre-Star Wars 1970s film, which is to say there’s time for character shading. Hoult and Law approach their roles from the same direction, as does Tye Sheridan, playing the local cop increasingly being brought into play by Husk.
I could see Dustin Hoffman in Sheridan’s performance and the film can be watched from that angle too – was that Steve McQueen, Robert Redford, Robert Shaw?
Kurzel’s pacing is exquisite. Contemplative scenes with slow edits, action scenes with fast edits, composited together into a satisfying whole. Some chat, an explosion, a meeting, a bank job, and so on. Jed (brother of Justin) Kurzel’s score is a thing of wonder too. Clanking, moaning, groaning and buzzing, it’s like he’s rediscovered Ennio Morricone’s knack of repurposing the unconventional. It’s incredibly effective, amplifying and supporting the entire film.
In shootouts, the different calibres of bullet make different sounds as they whistle through the air. Attention to detail is one of the reasons why this film is so compelling. But also at times gruesome – there is one death that is remarkably brutal, and Kurzel keeps his camera on the face of the panicking dying person as blood wells out of the chest and pools in the cleft of their neck. Violence is not nice is the message, and Kurzel makes sure we get it.
Hoult’s performance seems to have picked up a lot of praise, because, I’m guessing, Bob is a long, long way from Hoult as a sweet kid in films like About a Boy, or as a cute zombie in Warm Bodies. But for me Law is the standout. Terry Husk is a familiar character – demons and all that – but Law suggests throughout that there’s something very unsavoury lurking in Terry’s background. Where is the family Terry keeps saying are about to join him but never does?
There are so many other good performances though – Sheridan, as already mentioned (has he ever been bad?), Jurnee Smollett, a touch underused as a fellow FBI badass but suggesting so many dimensions in the relationship between her character and Terry. Victor Slezak, a standout in a small role as the boss of the Aryan Nation, the Nazi outfit not Nazi enough for Mathews’s liking.
The Order also marks the return of the “benign government thriller”. The FBI are the good guys. The local cops, initially marked out as being a little corrupt maybe, turn out to be the good guys too. This means it’s not entirely in the 1970s wheelhouse, where conspiracy theorising ruled the day. I suppose when the choice is between order and The Order…
The Order – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
