THE ORDER****

I bloody love the films that Justin Kurzel makes.  They focus on disturbed and disturbing people committing or manipulating people to murder.  They feature spare stark scripts and searing brutal performances. And long-time collaborator and DP Adam Arkapaw often sets the moral corruption of man against a backdrop of stunning landscapes.  SNOWTOWN, MACBETH and most recently NITRAM gave us character portraits of tortured evil.  Kurzel's latest film, THE ORDER, casts that character study within a police procedural.

We are in early 80s small-town mid-western America and this film is based on a real-life story.  The Feds are on the trail of a young charismatic neo-Nazi who is orchestrating a series of bank robberies to fund his war on America.  His foundational text is the same one that inspired the Jan 6 insurrection.  Nicholas Hoult is the cult-leader Bob Mathews - handsome and convincing.  Mathews is sinister in how low-key he is but also how swiftly he can whip up a mob.  Jude Law continues to give career-best performances in his middle-career - following his turn as a truly sinister Henry VIII in FIREBRAND - with this self-effacing performance as a decent but scarred and often ill-judged Fed called Terry Husk.

Screenwriter Zach Baylin (CREED III) crafts a spare and slowly-ratcheting anxiety-inducing script.  The pivotal relationship is between Husk and Mathews who contain enough humanity to somehow not be able to take that pre-emptive shot. But I also loved the scenes between Hoult's Mathews an his father, a David Duke type figure played convincingly by Victor Slezak.  

THE ORDER plays like an old-fashioned police procedural, much as the recent JUROR NO 2 (also starring Hoult) played like an old-fashioned courtroom drama. I am here for it. I love the feeling of being in a handsomely-made, well-played, slow-burn, patient, unflashy, grown-up thriller.  There is nothing not to like about this film.

THE ORDER played Venice and Toronto 2024 and is available to stream on Amazon Prime. It is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes.