At various junctures in the sweeping slice of political Americana that is The Order, a man will produce a small red-covered paperback called The Turner Diaries which, at first glance, is a boys’ own adventure about a man who sets out to live in the mountains like Daniel Boone. It is, in fact, a book aimed at children. The main subject of The Turner Diaries, however, is a six-step path to a right-wing revolution that culminates in the “day of the ropes,” when people of color, Jews and anyone who stands in the way of white supremacy will swing.
The Turner Diaries was an inspiration for the fanatics who stormed the U.S. Capitol after the 2020 election. It was also a central text for The Order, a self-styled army formed in the early 1980s behind a charismatic former Mormon, Bob Matthews, whose mission was to make America white again. As a member of Aryan Nation’s congregation, he had had enough of talk. Bombings, assassinations and war financed by crime were the way to go.
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Australian director Justin Kurzel brings the same bleak sense of outsider thinking to his Venice competition title The Order that made Nitram, his portrait of the young misfit who carried out Australia’s worst mass shooting in 1996, so chilling. The Order, however, is framed as a police procedural, with Jude Law’s FBI agent Terry Husk persuading local law enforcement to help him run the local Fascists to ground after a synagogue and a skinflick cinema are bombed in suspiciously similar ways.
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And yet, it is just as much an action film, with urgently composed bank robberies, gun battles between the police and masked terrorists, and a chase through a burning house shot so brilliantly that it feels as if hell itself has erupted. What Zach Baylin’s script doesn’t serve up is any kind of cheap psychology. Various characters guess at the wellspring of this kind of hatred and gang members’ devotion to their young leader, but nobody pretends to hit the bullseye of comprehension. Hate groups usually do this, Husk will say. They don’t do that. But, as it turns out, they might do anything.
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Working with a young local detective Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan) and another crack FBI agent he once mentored, rough-hewn but commanding Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett), Husk brings his decades of experience ferreting out mafiosi and Klansmen to his pursuit of these gun-crazy conspirators. The place Husk has been sent — a small enclave of Washington State — is in the midst of the Cascades.
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Husk is a hunter by trade, after all. His place of peace aiming his rifle at elk but failing to shoot them. Bob Matthews seeks the same refuge. There is some suggestion that they are doppelgangers, single-minded men pitted against whatever enemies the world serves up, but it is only an authorial hint. Viewers have to interpret these undercurrents for themselves.
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The Order was real, the investigation was real; the police characters, however, are not individually real. Terry Husk is hardly an unfamiliar fictional standby — a grizzled veteran cop who drinks too much, focuses on his job with such ferocity that he hasn’t realized his family has left him and is merely inches from being completely washed up: never was a character better named. He could feel like no more than a cliché, but Jude Law brings such a range of nuance to every exchange that he is always fully, complicatedly human. Tye Sheridan, as the straight-arrow police officer Bowen, establishes his character’s space as a man quiet in the face of racket. Bowen grew up here, knows these men and equally knows — without joy, but a knowledge of duty — that he can bring them in. A scene in which he loses his nerve, staring at the car’s dashboard while Husk chases the bad guys, is a masterclass in the power of silence.
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On the flipside is Nicholas Hoult as Bob, the intense blue-eyed gaze that gave Emperor Peter in The Great an edge of royal craziness here redeployed as the compelling stare that ropes in his acolytes. Alison Oliver plays Matthews’ doubting wife, giving us a fully rounded character in just a few telling scenes.
In the manner of cult leaders everywhere, Matthews also has a mistress, Zillah (Odessa Young), a true believer who is bearing his child.
These people’s lives are modest; for both police and the renegade disaffected, the height of pleasure is a backyard barbecue. Even The Order’s lair, a vast barn-like space hung with swastikas, shooting targets and anti-Semitic posters, is more tawdry than terrifying — the work of mean little minds.
More frightening are the reminders, sprinkled through the script and in some sober end-titles, that while The Order’s survivors are still behind bars, their heirs are still ready for war.
Title: The Order
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Director: Justin Kurzel
Screenwriter: Zach Baylin
Cast: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, Marc Maron
Sales agent: AGC Studios
Running time: 1 hr 56 mins
