The Order (2024) - Review

Rating: 4 out of 5

AUSTRALIAN filmmaker Justin Kurzel is no stranger to tackling dark, true life crime dramas. His debut Snowtown was a deeply disturbing - yet restrained - look at one of Australia’s most notorious serial killers.

His latest, The Order, adopts the same approach to another real-life incident: this time taking place in 1980s America. It chronicles the rise of a neo-Nazi outfit who are seeking to start an army in order to reclaim America, as well as the lawmen who sought to stop them.

It is just as impressive as Snowtown, as well as eerily resonant, its depiction of angry white supremacists intent on creating an uprising sitting uncomfortably alongside the right-wing rhetoric now emanating from the corridors of power at the White House. A post script noting that the book and ideology used by the supremacists in this film (The Turner Diaries) is the same as that which instigated the January 6 coup attempt in Washington in 2021 ends things on a very sobering note.

To Kurzel’s credit, however, he doesn’t use the film to bludgeon home the message. Rather, he lets things simmer, almost organically enabling viewers to make the link between past and present.

He also doesn’t sensationalise or overplay the bad guys. Instead, he depicts them as everyday folk (family men), who spread their evil via church meetings, preying on festering resentments and social injustices. Their grievances are rooted in a credible ideology, that is then pushed to extremes.

The group in question call themselves The Order and are led by Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult, on compelling form), a blue-eyed country boy with a loving wife, adopted kids and a pregnant lover, who masterminds a set of bank robberies intended to finance his militia. Matthews is a real-life character.

Leading the effort to catch him is veteran FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law, representing a composite of true life characters), as well as a local cop (played by Tye Sheridan), who befriends him.

It’s in his depiction of Law’s lawman that Kurzel employs most dramatic license, with the grizzled nature of Husk (a veteran who has gone up against the KKK and The Mob at great personal cost) reminiscent of classic movie cops such as Popeye Doyle (The French Connection) and Vincent Hanna (Heat). But Law revels in the role, too, offering up a gutsy, haunted portrayal of a man who bears the emotional scars of past pursuits: whether in the outcomes that may have inadvertently cost innocent lives, or the way in which his dogged pursuit of suspects contributed to the loss of his family and his declining health.

Again, Kurzel - working from a script by Zach Baylin, which in turn is based upon the novel The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt - doesn't spoon-feed viewers. He allows the actors to convey a lot by look, gesture or even the physical constraints they experience (such as a recurring nose bleed that inhibits Husk at several points).

The action, meanwhile, is ruthlessly efficient without being overly spectacular - Kurzel allowing things to unfold in an unflinching, gritty style more befitting a '70s style thriller, as opposed to anything too overly choreographed or overly heroic. There's an immediacy and chaos to the violence, which makes it more credible - even if his final sequence, involving the attempted capture of Mathews, assumes something more end of days.

But as thrillers go, The Order exists in the higher echelons of the genre. It's tough, it's intelligent and it's exciting. It's also a historical drama, rooted in depressing fact, that hold many lessons for today's viewers. And it doesn't over-sensationalise, cheapen or exploit its characters for dramatic gain or easy audience gratification, delivering in a no-nonsense, grounded style that allow it to hit home that much harder.