‘The Order’ Review: A Paunchy Jude Law Dominates Neo-Nazi Drama

If three makes a trend, then take “The Order” as a proof of fact: Nobody delivers true crime quite like Justin Kurzel. Following 2011’s “Snowtown” and 2021’s “Nitram,” the filmmaker’s latest factual thriller confirms the Australian auteur as an expert of the form, a skilled technician at ease and at the peak of his abilities when conveying ambient unease. Premiering at this year’s Venice Film Festival, “The Order” might be the filmmaker’s most accomplished work to date, offsetting a kind of broody fatalism against natural splendor, and punctuating the bloody affair with an action beat.

While both “Snowtown” and “Nitram” played as slow builds towards specific tragedies – tallying the institutional and personal failings that led to the Snowtown murders and the Port Arthur massacre – this latest film hews a more rolling timeline, tracking a white-supremacist splinter group responsible for a handful of murders and a string of heists, but whose most lethal impact was by way of a still resonant ideology. 

Like “Mississippi Burning” by way of “Heat,” Kurzel’s epic procedural pays equal heed to both cops and robbers, recognizing that personal sacrifice and fanatic dedication are par the course on both sides of the line. Without ever defending an antisocial system that can only fully express itself through violence, the filmmakers force a more disturbing (if ultimately beneficial) tact by contending with those true believers on their own terms, noticing the very human mechanisms behind hatred.

Leading the fuzz is FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law, making an absolute meal of his middle age). Pickled and paunchy and with his best days and family life in the rearview mirror, this onetime hotshot has been put out to pasture in the Bureau’s Idaho office – his career ending on a whimper but for the local Aryan Nation’s newly activated terrorist cell. 

Husk is a taciturn man, but then, the same could be said for everyone else on screen, with the actor’s creases and slower gait helping to define his character as well. But that casting approach cuts both ways, with the young deputy (Tye Sheridan) and FBI colleague (Jurnee Smollett) soon enlisted for the case leaving less of an impression, owing in no small part to actors’ clean cuts and relative youth.  

Of course, youth can be frightening, especially when met with cold-hearted ambition. Of that, local son Bob Matthews (Nicolas Hoult) has few equals. A child of the Aryan Nation and a true believer down to his bones, Matthews’ youthful zealotry turned the man heretic when faced with a more incremental view of change. 

Abstracted from specifics, the ideological divisions that cleave Matthews from Aryan Nation leader Richard Butler (Victor Slezak) are all too familiar. The older man, for all his distrust of the federal government, is a liberal in many respects. Butler believes in structural change (“Soon we’ll have our own members of congress and the Senate,” he says with alarming accuracy), while Matthews is a radical with a taste for direct action. And if many films have already gazed into this particular abyss, few have framed neo-Nazi thought as an active belief system, one marked by the similar factions and disputes of other, nobler causes. 

Funded by a string of holdups that only further the comparison to “Heat,” Matthews’ splinter cell – calling itself The Order in reference to the hate-group handbook “The Turner Diaries” – lashes inward and toward the wider world, targeting both big talking acolytes and a Denver radio host who sees right through their bull. In a choice one could only call casting to type, Marc Maron plays real-life murder victim Alan Berg, a Jewish DJ the group targets less for his religion (though he would have likely been spared had his last name been Burke) than for his clear-eyed analysis and dismantling of xenophobic rhetoric. Berg’s words continue to resonate well after his voice gets silenced, echoed in Matthews’ own appeals to grievance and insecurity when fielding new recruits. 

Set in the rural Northwest though shot in Canada, “The Order” situates much of its action in the great outdoors, relying on wide vistas and God’s-eye-view perspectives to lend the narrative a sense of grim fatalism. While Zach Baylin’s script follows a familiar cat-and-mouse pattern, the director builds out a thoroughly unique mood, mixing composer Jed Kurzel’s thrumming, death-rattle score with blasts of white noise to disquiet all the more.

As in his previous efforts, Kurzel creates a ghostly atmosphere that is haunting before a single body hits the ground.  

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