Certificate: TBC

Running Time: 114 mins

UK Distributor: Prime Video

UK Release Date: TBC

REVIEWED AT TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024

WHO’S IN THE ORDER?

Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, Alison Oliver, Odessa Young, Marc Maron, Huxley Fisher, Sebastian Pigott, Phillip Forest Lewitski, George Tchortov, Victor Slezak, Philip Granger, Daniel Doheny

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Justin Kurzel (director, producer), Zach Baylin (writer), Stuart Ford, Bryan Haas and Jude Law (producers), Jed Kurzel (composer), Adam Arkapaw (cinematographer), Nick Fenton (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

In the early 1980s, an FBI agent (Law) pursues a dissident group of white supremacists…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THE ORDER?

Anyone who has ever seen the news in the past ten or so years knows full well about the rise of nationalism and racist ideologies in the modern political battleground of America. But as we all know, both of those things have been around well before Donald Trump, his deranged MAGA movement, the complicit right-wing conservative media et al brought it out of the shadows, and The Order – director Justin Kurzel’s often gripping but always timely exploration of such extremist views from not even half a century ago – takes a chilling look at how radical extremism among some of the most hateful people in existence was, and still is, a force to tackle with utmost seriousness.

Taking place during the early 1980s, we primarily follow Terry Husk (a moustachioed Jude Law), a disgruntled FBI agent reassigned to a dead-end office in a small Idaho ghost town, after a somewhat vague incident has estranged him from his own family. He quickly picks up on some devious criminal activity, among them counterfeiting rings and bank robberies, by a group of white supremacists known as “The Order”, named after such an organisation in a classic piece of neo-Nazi literature titled The Turner Diaries, which also serves as a step-by-step guide to essentially taking over the country, including high-profile assassinations and the lynching of government officials.

This band of dissidents is led by Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), a steely-eyed and soft-spoken young man who has become disillusioned with the non-active playbook of his former neo-Nazi congregation – which makes it extremely depressing that the voices of reason in this scenario are themselves a bunch of hateful racists – and in response has decided to raise an army that will lead him into direct conflict with the powers that be.

Though we are very much on the side of Law’s gruff and hard-boiled FBI agent during this cat-and-mouse crime thriller, The Order is at its most effective when director Kurzel and writer Zach Baylin are detailing the deeply disturbing methods that Hoult’s Bob and his growing band of miscreants use to spread their ideology and recruit more people to their cause. The film, based loosely on real events as well as the non-fiction book The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, depicts Mathews as a figure whose blatant sociopathy prevents him from becoming wholly charismatic (something that Hoult nails eerily well in one of his most insidious roles to date), but it is his ideals, and how they lay the path for total white Christian dominance, that ultimately attract these people’s attention. As is the case to this day, it is not the messenger that people are drawn towards, but the message itself, and it’s enough for some sects of people to forego all other reason and double down on their hateful rhetoric. That alone is a scary idea that both Kurzel and Baylin double down on within a narrative that lets it play out to its fullest, and most terrifying, potential.

There isn’t quite as much intrigue whenever we’re focusing on the law – by which I mean both actor Jude Law and the enforcement that his character works for. Law is on top form here, in a role that is probably his equivalent to Gene Hackman in The French Connection, as he leans into the gruffness of his role with gusto, even coming off as quite intimidating in certain scenes where he makes the most of impromptu nosebleeds. However, the character of Terry Husk more or less fits the mould of your average lead in a crime procedural show, with his narrative largely consisting of familiar crime movie tropes that happen to be well-executed by director Kurzel. Husk isn’t a terribly written character, though the conventions that he’s working around – right down to a squeaky-clean sidekick whose fate you can already determine as soon as their happy young family is introduced – would make it seem like he’s less interesting than he probably is, because he’s not hugely different to a lot of other gruff and gritty cop types in countless other media.

Though one is infinitely more fascinating than the other, both strands do come together quite nicely for a series of invigorating sequences that bring out a fiercely tense energy from the filmmakers. Some scenes involving robberies of armoured vehicles, and others depicting foot chases between motels and suburban houses, are accompanied by a very restricted musical score (provided by Justin’s brother Jed Kurzel), or sometimes even no score whatsoever, which neatly builds a nice few layers of suspense as you’re never entirely sure what might come round the corner, seeing how there’s often no stinger to accompany certain reveals.

There is definitely a hint of both Michael Mann’s Heat as well as, again, The French Connection in the way that Kurzel builds tension, particularly whenever both cop and criminal come within a gnat’s pube of crossing each other’s paths in the (ahem) heat of the action. It’s an interesting contrast to Kurzel’s previous film Nitram – an overall stronger film, in my opinion – which focused so much on the build-up to its own devastating set of events that it never even shows the actual violence outright, whereas in The Order it’s a strong combination of both build-up and pay-off, with both elements working fairly well in conjunction with one another.

But as vivid and suspenseful as The Order is, it is ultimately a sobering reminder that, as much as very few of us want it around, right-wing extremism is far from being defeated. What may have gone down four decades ago is just as prominent today, if not more so, with this film serving as a useful guide to spotting the ways in which this kind of hate can indeed be stamped out of existence once and for all.

SO, TO SUM UP…

The Order is a tense crime thriller that’s more fascinating whenever it’s exploring the sinister methods of extremist white supremacists than it is as a decent but largely conventional law procedural.

It’s too early for cinema showtimes, but stay tuned!