Tragically, stories of white-supremacist sects and domestic terrorism in the United States are evergreen, never not relevant to what’s happening in the news. But the relevant can still feel depressingly familiar, which keeps The Order from registering as anything but a slightly more competent tale of FBI agents circling in on bomb-throwing racists.
Screenwriter Zach Baylin (The Crow 2024, King Richard), working from the non-fiction book The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, and director Justin Kurzel never quite land on an effective way to tell the story of real-life white-supremacist group The Order and its eventual downfall: As a procedural, it’s by-the-numbers. If it’s supposed to be a character study, the characters are TV-familiar.
We meet FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law), assigned to the sleepy branch office in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho (where he appears to be the sole employee) after a distinguished career of bringing down mobsters and Klansmen. He pops pills, drinks, and leaves rambling, sad messages on his wife’s answering machine, hoping that she and their daughters will join him once he gets settled. (If “Husk” wasn’t the name of the real Fed involved in this case, Baylin should have ditched such an obvious descriptor after the first draft.)
Husk sees white-supremacist literature around town from the Aryan Nation church run by Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), but when a local racist is found buried in a shallow grave, Husk realizes the real threat is a former disciple of Butler’s named Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), a charismatic bigot who has started his own offshoot, one that’s been committing bank robberies and bombing synagogues and porn shops. With the help of local deputy Jamie (Tye Sheridan), Husk figures out that Mathews’ organization is using the racist novel The Turner Diaries as a how-to, and that The Order’s wave of crimes is just the beginning of a more sinister conspiracy.
The film’s closing title cards tell us that The Turner Diaries went on to inspire many more acts of domestic terrorism, from the Oklahoma City bombing to the January 6 coup attempt, but the movie never builds any kind of suspense or detective legwork to piece together Bob’s particular plans. Butler’s second-in-command hands off a copy to Jamie, and he reads it. Mystery solved.
To its credit, The Order occasionally delivers stand-out moments: Early on, Kurzel crafts a raggedly suspenseful bank robbery that somehow feels different than the hundreds of other movie bank robberies committed to film over the decades. (The director’s true-crime experience with The Snowtown Murders, Nitram, and True History of the Kelly Gang comes to play most vividly in this sequence.)
There’s also a quietly gut-wrenching scene with Husk and fellow FBI agent Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett) visiting the bourgeois parents (played affectingly by Judith Buchan and David LeReaney) of one of Mathews’ lieutenants. It’s the film’s most powerful moment of granular humanity amidst the otherwise standard feds-versus-terrorists drama, with the couple conveying the devastation that comes with losing a child to hateful dogma.
“Standard,” alas, is the watchword here. A talented ensemble brings the characters to life inasmuch as the script allows, with Law and Smollett delivering grizzled cynicism while Sheridan affects wide-eyed idealism. Hoult effectively portrays Mathews’ wicked charisma — particularly in a scene at a racist confab where he steals the spotlight from Richard Butler — but there’s not all that much more to him. (The actor is also saddled with distracting hair that has been styled as a simultaneous bowl cut and mullet; even if that was the real Mathews’ coif of choice, it’s a look that pulls focus.) And though it’s a small role, Marc Maron is both obviously and perfectly cast as Denver radio personality Alan Berg, who was murdered by Mathews’ men (and inspired Eric Bogosian’s stage piece Talk Radio, later turned into a film by Oliver Stone).
The ubiquitous quality of the real-life US militia movement is both horrific and numbing, and quashing it, a seemingly hopeless task. Fewer rote choices on the part of the filmmakers might have imbued The Order with the zeitgeist-fueled intensity it merits. Instead, it’s more business as usual.
Director: Justin Kurzel
Screenwriter: Zach Baylin, based on the book “The Silent Brotherhood” by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt
Cast: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, Alison Oliver, Odessa Young, Marc Maron
Producers: Bryan Haas, Stuart Ford, Justin Kurzel, Jude Law
Executive producers: Miguel A. Palos Jr., Zach Garrett, Anant Tamirisa, Zach Baylin, Kate Susman, Ben Jackson, Stephen Fuss, Alastair Burlingham, Gary Raskin, Jeremy Saulnier, Sean Patrick O’Reilly, Eric Rebalkin
Director of photography: Adam Arkapaw
Production design: Karen Murphy
Costume design: Rachel Dainer-Best
Editing: Nick Fenton
Music: Jed Kurzel
Sound design: Andy Neil, sound designer, re-recording mixer; Glenn Newnham, supervising adr editor, supervising dialogue editor
Production companies: MGM, Vertical, AGC Studios
In English
116 minutes
