On June 18th, 1984, Alan Berg was assassinated outside of his home in Denver, Colorado. The confrontational talk-radio host had made a name for himself by arguing on-air with, among others, anti-Semites and white supremacists. A group known as “The Order,” who had taken their name from the fictional hate-mongers in the novel The Turner Diaries, had been responsible for Berg’s murder. They were also behind a series of bank robberies throughout the Pacific Northwest, as well as stealing $3.6 million from a brinks truck in Ukiah, California. The goal was to fund a race war against the United States government. The organization’s founder, Robert Jay Matthews, would die in a stand-off with federal agents in a safe house in Whidbey Island, Washington.
Based on the book The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Order recounts both how these men prepared for what they believed would be an armed revolution against the powers that be and how the law-enforcement officers who endeavored to stop them finally connected the dots. It’s a true-crime thriller, and a truly tense, expertly handled one at that — Australian director Justin Kurzel is the sort of filmmaker who excels at this pulse-pounding, 1970s-style pulp kind of thing, and his previous movies The Snowtown Murders (2011) and Nitram (2021) demonstrate a knack for handling sensationalist material without seeming exploitative. (The only other working filmmaker who’s arguably better at crafting such solid, reliably suspenseful nailbiters without sacrificing creativity and/or guttural genre pleasures is Green Room/Rebel Ridge auteur Jeremy Saulnier — and he’s an executive producer on this.)
It’s also a star vehicle of sorts, and one that makes you both admire and re-evaluate the star who’s driving it. Screenwriter Zach Baylin (King Richard, Gran Turismo) has ginned up a composite FBI agent named Terry Husk to lead the investigation into the fringe militia group, and you’ll immediately recognizable the archetype — a guy who cares too much, is too good at his job and way too lousy at those little petty life things such as marriage, parenthood, health, boundaries, etc. Terry suffers from a professionalism that borders on a pathology, anger issues, and the aftermath of a medical procedure involving his heart, in that order of severity. On his “off days,” this white knight trawling in a dark, white-supremacist world likes to hunt elk, a hobby which couldn’t feel more strong-silent-masculine or blatantly allegorical.
Watching Jude Law play this difficult-man antihero, however, is what makes The Order go from good to damn near great. The 51-year-old actor aged out of his pretty-boy phase years ago, and is several decades past being a celebrity trolled by toxic tabloids. He’s stuck around long enough to outlast the memories of both mediocre franchises (Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies) and downright bad ones (those Harry Potter spin-offs), and continued to book work ranging from The Young Pope to Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. Occasionally, he’d show up in a caricaturish crime flick like Dom Hemingway (2013), bulked up to near-unrecognizable proportions, or a complicated, caustic drama like The Nest (2020), and you were reminded that he could color outside the limiting leading-man and/or matinee-idol eye-candy box when he so desired.
But with The Order, Law seems to have found some other register and tapped into something way more interesting than the usual noble-but-flawed good guy routine. There’s a lived-in gruffness to this gum-chewing lawman, a way that he holds himself that suggests a toughed-up backstory without spelling it all out. (Husk’s past cases involving the KKK and Cosa Nostra are invoked, but not deep-dived into; the closest we get is a regret-tinged anecdote about an informant that ends up dead.) Stocky but not jacked, stoic but not a cipher, and deftly able to transition to explosive but not scenery-chomping in a blink, his obsessive Fed feels like a throwback to a different era of rugged, tortured men running around and firing shotguns at perps. It’s an above-the-title ’70s character actor type of turn that fits the movie’s tone to a tee.
And while he’s playing this dogged pursuer close to the vest, he’s also not above the odd, WTF choice in terms of screen business; a scene in which Husk physically invades the space of a suspect in a jail cell by pressing himself into the man, as if he were trying to both nuzzle and full-body crush him like a bug, is all the more jarring for its uncomfortably intimate approach to rage. Even his rapport with Tye Sheridan and Jurnee Smollett — playing, respectively, a deputy who becomes Husk’s way in to the case and a fellow jaded Fed — has a give-and-take that makes this reactive characters seems richer. This is the sort of career-best work that suggests Law could able fill the gap left by Robert Duvall — or at the very least, makes us feel that we’ve been blessed with the second coming of Joe Don Baker or Clu Gulager.
Nicholas Hoult in ‘The Order.’
Vertical
At it’s core, however, The Order is really a horror film, made all the more frightening because the monsters who live on these Everytown, USA, Maple Streets seem way too prevalent at the present moment. Baylin has said that this rearview-mirror look at the origins of a headline-making hate crime would be timely no matter when it was made, and he’s not wrong. Yet the predominance of these ideologies and the sheer amount of rancid hate speech that’s been “normalized” over the past decade definitely lends a more jagged edge to this story. It’s not that Matthews, portrayed by Nicholas Hoult as part everybro-next-door and part curdled leader of men, is a particularly fascinating figure, even as he’s given a good amount of screen time. It’s that he seems too familiar by half. A disclaimer that mentions the way in which The Turner Diaries has become a blueprint for domestic terrorism seems almost superfluous — the “stages” it mentions are recognizable enough now to make you sick. “In 10 years, we’ll have members in the Senate,” one racist figurehead says. He was only off by a few decades.
