Justin Kurzel’s The Order is an absorbing, beautifully shot, impressively acted crime thriller of the kind we don’t see much on our theater screens anymore. And it comes with a timely and troubling twist: Based on true events, the film follows the FBI’s pursuit in the mid-1980s of a group of neo-Nazis in the Pacific Northwest who committed a series of daring robberies to finance their activities. Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way: Yes, the movie’s villains spout hateful rhetoric that sounds alarmingly close to things we might hear in mainstream discourse nowadays; such are the times we live in. But what makes The Order even more intriguing and disturbing is the sly way that Kurzel takes familiar cat-and-mouse crime-movie tropes and cleverly poisons them. The Order is like Heat with white supremacists — with all the discomfort that description implies.
The cat, in this case, is Jude Law’s embittered, volatile FBI agent Terry Husk, whose lonely pursuit of violent criminals has clearly corroded his mind and body well before he arrives in town; Husk’s got a drinking problem, a broken (and unspoken) family past, and a giant surgery scar running up his chest. Law is almost unrecognizable in the role, not because of any physical transformation — all that’s new is an admittedly pretty great mustache — but because he’s so internalized Husk’s damaged psychology that there’s nothing left of the persona we might imagine when we think “Jude Law.” It’s a magnificently explosive performance, especially when contrasted with our mouse, Nicholas Hoult’s Bob Mathews, a methodical heartland fascist-farmer who leads the titular splinter group of neo-Nazis. Bob is calm, clear-eyed, and centered. He lives in nature and understands it. He’s such a family man, he’s got two of them: His wife can’t bear children, so he’s also got himself a pregnant girlfriend. Hoult (who’s having a pretty great year, what with this, Juror No. 2 and Nosferatu) plays Bob as a strapping, confident, articulate leader. Looking into those icy blue eyes, we understand why people might follow him — but we also wonder if he’s about to blow someone’s head off. Maybe the two qualities aren’t so different.
This introduces a classic duality we’ve seen in other cops-and-robbers movies: The obsessive pursuers let their lives fall apart while they hunt down their charismatic prey. Husk is joined in his efforts by Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), a young and idealistic local police officer who knows some of the people they’re pursuing; over the course of the film, Jamie goes from a loving and attentive family man himself to a single-minded neurotic not unlike Husk. Meanwhile, the hunted not only seem at ease in the world, but they flirt with an outlaw allure. Again, it’s a familiar genre element. Robert De Niro might be a ruthless killer in Heat, but he’s also a stud; we can fantasize a little about wanting to be him. But only a lunatic would want Bob Mathews and his merry band of psychos to get away in The Order — we really want Husk & Co. to nail them — so even a faint whiff of identification becomes a terrible thought. That hint of cognitive dissonance makes the film almost nauseatingly gripping, and disturbing.
The Order was a real organization. When we first see its members in the film, they’re about to execute one of their own for talking to the cops. It’s late at night, and they’re listening to the Jewish Denver talk-radio host Alan Berg, whose liberal values and confrontational style they despise (and whom members of the Order would gun down in 1984 — Berg’s career and death inspired Oliver Stone and Eric Bogosian’s 1988 film Talk Radio). “The only thing you all have in common is you’re too stupid to get by in the world,” we hear Berg telling one of the anti-Semitic goons calling in to his show to spew hate at him. But Bob can get by in the world. The Order shows us how someone with real smarts could turn these ghouls into a more effective and organized army.
There have been other films over the years about the problem of domestic terrorism and hate groups in America, everything from Costa-Gavras’s Betrayed (which was also partly inspired by the story of the Order) to American History X to the Daniel Radcliffe–starring Imperium.
All of them work the obvious, upsetting idea that the people in these hate groups are usually quite ordinary in all sorts of other ways. The Order goes beyond that, showing us the inherent danger of magnetic leaders, as well as the debilitating toll of chasing an evil that sometimes seems uncontainable. Law and Hoult’s differing energies turn the film into something more than a mere crime drama; it begins to feel like an eternal struggle with existential, civilizational consequences. This is an unforgettable movie.
