Rating: R | Runtime: 114 minutes
Release Date: December 6th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Vertical Entertainment
Director(s): Justin Kurzel
Writer(s): Zach Baylin / Gary Gerhardt & Kevin Flynn (novel The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground)

The thing that never dies is the dead man’s deeds.

As soon as Terry Husk (Jude Law) flipped to the part of The Turner Diaries that showed three nooses hanging in front of a crowd, the only thing I could think about were images from the insurrection of January 6th, 2021. I wasn’t therefore surprised to find that William Luther Pierce’s white nationalist novel was an inspiration for what happened there—according to the text that runs at the end of Justin Kurzel’s The Order. It makes perfect sense considering the way Richard Butler (Victor Slezak) tries to quell Bob Mathews’ (Nicholas Hoult) anger by talking about the “long game.” Once the Aryan Nation infiltrates the federal government, he says, all their dreams will come true. Welcome to 2024.

Well, Bob doesn’t want to wait. He wants to turn words into action through his separatist group within that movement right now in 1983. And, as we discover through Zach Baylin’s adaptation of Gary Gerhardt and Kevin Flynn’s book The Silent Brotherhood, he had the ability to do it. How? By not following the usual tactics. White nationalists weren’t known for bombings and robberies, so a federal agent like Husk would never have put Mathews’ work onto his radar. Not until a local cop (Tye Sheridan’s Jamie Bowen) starts putting the pieces together courtesy of a drunk childhood friend talking a bit too much about what his “brothers” were doing. Even then, however, Bob was methodical. He was patient. His war was about to begin.

Kurzel’s film unfolds from both sides: Husk and Bowen’s pursuit (aided by Jurnee Smollett’s Agent Carney) and Mathews’ crimes. The idea, of course, is that these parallel lines will eventually cross via a pressure cooker of a climax that would ultimately leave one or more of them dead. The trick then is to make the journey captivating. It’s about delving into the complexities of these men at the center and how similar they might be behind the sides they’ve taken. Both Terry and Bob are myopic. They are dedicated to their causes and insulate themselves from risk by placing foot soldiers onto the game board first. They talk about love, but, inevitably, everyone other than them are expendable.

The script tries to home in on this comparison through a not-so-chance meeting and an intriguing desire to keep the other alive, but it can feel a bit too forced considering that sort of “both sides-ing” simply doesn’t fly post-Trump. That’s not to say Baylin is trying to humanize Mathews. On the contrary, this character’s pathological ability to hook followers and lovers to him while obviously hanging them out to dry does the opposite. It’s more about humanizing Husk considering he’s no better in action. Where he is, though, is empathy. Yes, he’s hung his fair share of people out to dry too, but at least he suffers for it. Utilitarianism shouldn’t erase the executioner’s guilt.

It’s a nice change of pace for Law. We don’t often get to see him play broken people, but he does a very good job making us experience Terry’s pain through disconnected phone lines and candid talks with Carney and Jamie’s wife (Morgan Holmstrom’s Kimmy). Hoult is effectively playing against type too. Usually the innocent hero with a smile, that charisma works well to provide his monster a chilling air of matter-of-fact evil here. Their story unfolds linearly and without much flourish, but that’s to its drama’s benefit by keeping things lean while still ramping up the stakes. I was invested from the opening prologue of backwoods murder straight through to its fiery finale.

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Jude Law in THE ORDER; courtesy of Vertical.