Modern domestic terrorism may have reached its peak with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in which members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other white-nationalist groups attempted to aid Donald Trump’s quest to overthrow the presidential election, but its roots run far deeper.
The Order, Jason Kurzel’s unnerving based-on-real-events drama, recounts one of the earliest skirmishes in the battle between law enforcement and hate groups intent on sowing civil disorder, focusing on an early 1980s organization that sought to instigate a race war. Featuring a standout performance by Jude Law as an FBI agent determined to prevent a tragic massacre, it’s a history lesson that compensates for a lack of breakneck thrills with ominous timeliness.
As with Kurzel’s prior true-crime effort, 2021’s Nitram, The Order—premiering on Aug. 31 at the Venice Film Festival, after which it’ll appear at the Toronto International Film Festival—is a story about disaffected young white men traversing empty landscapes stained with hate and violence that fester and spread in the dusty sunlight. Moreover, it’s about children whose corrosive hearts and minds are unpredictable to strangers and unfathomable to parents, such that when Law’s Terry Husk visits the home of a suspected neo-Nazi, the young man’s father laments, “You think you have control over who they'’e going to be, but the truth is, you don’t. You try to protect them—that’s the best you can do. But you can't live their life for them.”
Working from a script by Zach Baylin (based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s 1989 non-fiction book The Silent Brotherhood), Kurzel once again immerses himself in a world of rage and madness that’s scary precisely for being so clandestine.
Husk rolls into Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in 1983 to staff an FBI office that the local sheriff says hasn’t been operational in years. A quiet and uneventful outpost is ostensibly what Husk craves, in part because—as indicated by an early phone call home—it’s a final chance for him to reconnect with the estranged wife and daughters who’ve yet to relocate with him.
Later conversations let slip that Husk previously worked undercover with the New York mafia and the KKK, and the wear and tear of those assignments is visible in his bleary eyes, downturned mouth, and slumped shoulders. Sporting a mustache surrounded by stubble that seems to epitomize his character’s haggardness, Law oozes weariness. But he isn’t simply exhausted; he’s deeply angry and forlorn. In a superbly interior turn, the actor evokes the cause-and-effect relationship between Husk’s fury and misery, as well as his inextinguishable desire to fulfill his law-and-order mission—even at the expense of those he holds dear.
Though The Order doesn’t press this point too heavily, the same can be said about Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), a white supremacist whose gang is carrying out a string of daring crimes, beginning with a bank robbery that nets them close to $50,000. Husk learns about this incident and other bombings and stick-ups perpetrated by Mathews only after he asks the sheriff about the white-power flyers about town and gets some intel from officer Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan).
According to Bowen, the flyers aren’t the sole thing being manufactured by the bigots; they’re also printing counterfeit bills. Thus, an investigation is born, and initially points the duo in the direction of the man who told Jamie about this fake-money scheme, whom The Order has already depicted being executed by Mathews’ henchmen.
Hoult’s baddie is a true-believer who’s splintered off from his mentor, and he and his acolytes quickly become bolder and more lethal, as evidenced by their June 18, 1984, execution of Jewish radio DJ Alan Berg (Marc Maron)—a horrific slaying that ultimately earns the perpetrators David Lane (Phillip Forest Lewitski) and Bruce Pierce (Sebastian Pigott) hundreds of years behind bars.
Kurzel ably establishes Mathews’ ethos, ruthlessness, and tangled relationships with his wife Debbie (Alison Oliver) and his pregnant mistress Zillah (Odessa Young). However, as with some of Husk and Bowen’s sleuthing (which is aided by Jurnee Smollett’s FBI agent Joanne Carney), it occasionally feels as if key connective tissue is missing from his tale. The Order isn’t confusing but it can be more than a tad wispy, including with regards to its heist and shootout sequences, which are frustratingly perfunctory. No matter the director’s evocative visuals– including a handful of propulsive shots from the corners of cars’ bumpers—the material is rarely exciting.
Fortunately, it is often movingly morose, especially as Husk and Bowen start putting the pieces of this puzzle together, most of them having to do with The Turner Diaries, the infamous 1978 neo-Nazi novel that—as it did for many who followed in his wake, including Timothy McVeigh—functions as Mathews’ blueprint for tearing down contemporary American civilization and erecting a new white-nationalist world order.
This despicable tome and its caustic influence are central to The Order’s story and atmosphere, and casts the proceedings as not simply a terrifying saga in its own right, but a prelude to the greater domestic calamities to come. Whereas Hoult’s Mathews is a generic (if vile) right-wing extremist who’s committed to preserving a rural, traditional, Caucasian way of life, The Turner Diaries proves the film’s genuine villain.
As Husk and Bowen track Mathews across the Pacific Northwest, The Order becomes narratively diffuse, such that a late tragedy is rendered a relative afterthought. Trying to remain faithful to the historical record while simultaneously adding a few writerly flourishes—such as paralleling Husk and Mathews as kindred spirits—Baylin’s script splits the difference, thereby shortchanging everything. Still, as a primer on a formative phase of the United States’ white nationalist movement, as well as an eye-opening look at the means by which hateful rhetoric (spoken and written) inevitably begets brutal action, Kurzel’s latest is at once illuminating and chilling.
Moreover, courtesy of Law, it exudes both a burning desire to call attention to this scourge—and to do something about it—as well as a dejected fear that, perhaps, the rot has already grown so severe and deep that nothing short of amputation will fix it.
