Justin Kurzel’s The Order is an unnerving recounting of the white supremacist terrorist group known as “The Order” operating in the 80’s. It’s also based on the non-fiction novel, “The Silent Brotherhood,” by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, on the accounts of what happened in 1983. Jude Law plays the Idaho-based FBI agent who catches wind of the group’s activities after multiple robberies take place along the Pacific Northwest. Nicholas Hoult plays The Order leader and white supremacist Bob Matthew in a chilling performance of utter contempt and rage.
On a technical level, The Order features strong performances by Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult. Hoult does some of his best work as the raged-filled Matthew, a man who thinks the world owes him everything while simultaneously seeking to take and destroy from others. Law gives a more restrained yet gruff performance as FBI agent Terry Husk. He is a little cliched in the weathered law enforcement way but still compelling enough to ground the film.
The Order is, sadly, not unlike many other significant historical markers in the United States. It doesn’t matter how many subgroups of white supremacy spawn across the history of America; they all pledge allegiance to one thing: hate. It’s where Kurzel leans on the most. In the blinding rage and hate that engulfs everything these groups touch, even at the cost of burning themselves. This makes a fitting end to Hoult’s Matthew, as he chooses to stay inside the burning home after being corralled by the FBI. He climbs into the bathroom tub and waits for death to claim him. Like the coward he was.
The film’s most crucial aspect is Kurzel’s lack of interest in “humanizing” someone like Bob Matthew. What is there to humanize when hating strips you of all your humanity? When your faith and religion is violence? The Order is not interested in finding the pieces of what’s left of Matthgew’s humanity. It’s leveraging the inherent nature of these power dynamics. Why should Kurzel linger any longer than he has to on the “sad” backstory of Matthew’s life when people like Matthew blame innocent people for their shortcomings? When their response to government failures, which have failed all, is hate and violence? Not directed at government institutions for their economic and social shortcomings but for disregarding what they saw as their “native” right to claim a land that was never theirs. In the name of “white power.”
It’s not unlike what we’ve seen from the Republican party in our modern context. The Order is just a reminder of how much the Obama presidency was a mirage—a reprieve from what is always lurking in the underbelly of the American monolith. It was naive of liberals to think that ushering in the first black president would erase decades of racism and social imbalance. Not when the best the United States could do in a post-slave world is to sweep it all under the rug. Kurzel is here to remind us of that.
In what can sometimes become a cliche for semi-biographical films, Kurzel uses the afterword informative text at the end of The Order with radical precision—bridging the gap between 1983 and 2024 with a reference to the 2020 attack on the Capitol as another example of insurrection attempts by white supremacy—only, this time, at the beck and call of a former and now, again, future president of the United States, Donald Trump. Kurzel’s vision is brutally clear-cut. It doesn’t meander around within the moral justifications radical groups like The Order conjure as excuses. Originally from Australia, Kurzel is an outsider looking in at the American establishment and holding up a mirror. What’s reflected is so continuous and permeated in our culture that there’s no real difference between 1983 and 2020. Dare I say The Order is not only the most important film to come out in 2024 but a chilling reminder of what America actually stands for.
Rating: 8.5/10
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