It’s fall 1983 in the Pacific Northwest, a historical hotbed for white poverty and white-power mobilization. Flannels flow like wine, backcountry bowl cut-adjacent male fringes mark burgeoning leadership, and there isn’t a shiny new car for 100 miles in any direction. On both sides of the law we find ourselves in the company of brawny mustachios and brazenly retreating widows’ peaks that form trenches of balding. The tremoring strings, blue-gray haze in the coloring, and heavy fog set the stage for something awful: the brief dawn of The Order.
Terry Husk (Jude Law)––an FBI agent with ample experience infiltrating and taking down white-supremacy hate groups within the Aryan Nations from Colorado to Washington state––comes to the tiny Idaho town of Coeur d’Alene to quiet down, the sole federal agent stationed in his region. But after serious counterfeiting reports and a string of horrifyingly captured bank robberies and armored-car heists, he’s back in the heat of the action.
He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s trailing The Order, a stray radical white-supremacy group led by the young Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) that’s using their loot to build up a war chest for genocide. He hates it but he has to work with sheepish local authorities that know little more than traffic violations. All except for one of them: Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan). He’s a newcomer who doesn’t have the experience to play ball on a case like this, but he happens to have some crucial information, a personal history with the people in question, and an ambition for justice that sets him apart from his podunk fellow officers.
Jamie turns Terry onto “The Turner Diaries,” a popular book among his old high school acquaintances. It’s a novel / manifesto-of-sorts that informs The Order’s extremist ideology and terrorism efforts. Director Justin Kurzel and screenwriter Zach Baylin handpicked the story of The Order right out of the history books (adapted from Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s The Silent Brotherhood), as Kurzel’s done with past crime films, each (Nitram, The True History of the Kelly Gang, Snowtown) a clear-blown affirmation that life is crazier than fiction, and, to take it one step further, that the most frightening microcosms of violence in history point to much larger realities of today.
That means “The Turner Diaries” is no joke. (It’s educational details like these that make the film fascinating at times.) Published in 1978, it was and still is the (FBI-recognized) ideological foundation for a large swath of far-right, neo-Nazi, and white-supremacist groups across the United States. Its ultimate goal is domestic terrorism: to wage a war against the federal government, eventually storm the capitol (yes, this is where that came from), take control of the country, and systematically murder all Jewish and non-white people.
Australian native Kurzel has finally––as was inevitable at his climbing rate––begun telling stories stateside, but the move to the American West simply amounts to a setting shift. The film doesn’t feel foreign to his other work––a compliment or a dig, depending on how you read it. For one, The Order bears its fair share of clichés. You can guess how it’ll end. The boilerplate crime-thriller framework follows that of his past films, which don’t stray from the formula either.
Character details are tired (e.g. a hardened workaholic detective that avoids his family and a fresh uncorrupted small town cop that loves his) and overarching plot details just as sleepy (e.g. foolishly entering a burning building that’s clearly almost burnt down and staying in there way too long, or a “rousing” speech that definitively changes everything). It certainly keeps The Order out of groundbreaking, genre-evolving, or even unique territory.
But if you like the popular modern iteration of the subgenre, none of that will be a problem for you. Hell, it’ll be a godsend. The mammoth influence of Nolan and Villeneuve (especially Sicario) on contemporary, gritty crime thrillers is on full display in the gripping bird’s-eye highway caravans, the droning bass pitch-bending into a tone of dread in brother Jed Kurzel’s pounding score, and the grizzled, no-fucks-given approach of its veteran lead in Law (who also produced).
Kurzel moves his way through the formula like the seasoned pro he is, allowing even the skeptic to occasionally forget how worn the road of the typical thriller is these days. Where other filmmakers fall flat with the same material, Kurzel nails every emotional beat, wrenches your gut more than a few times, and immerses you in a primal modern history you likely don’t know this well. He weds the cinematic elements to a relatively memorable whole that envisions the past with clarity and hyper-relevance as only film can.
The Order premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and opens on December 6.