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.

NITRAM***** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 7

NITRAM is a stunning and disturbing film from Aussie writer-director Justin Kurzel that covers a deeply traumatic and controversial mass shooting in mid-1990s Tasmania. The perpetrator was a man called Martin, who was teased with the nickname Nitram because he was mentally "backward".  Indeed, it's a open question what's wrong with Martin. He seems childlike - his mother describes behaviour that seems psychopathic - he's being prescribed drugs for depression - he has an unhealthy obsession with fireworks and guns. What's clear is that his parents love him but also enable him - particularly his dad - and at various points of the film I became angry that he wasn't in a residential care facility rather than out and about in the general community. 

The truth is stranger than fiction.  This misfit somehow meets an incredibly wealthy eccentric older woman (Essie Davis) and she essentially bankrolls him and takes him in, even though even she draws the line at buying him a gun.  As the film develops we see that this newfound freedom and money does not satisfy Martin. He remains severely lonely, unhappy and disturbed. And so we move to the inevitable final act, which is handled delicately and largely off-screen. We are left with harsh questions.  Could his parents have prevented this? His doctors?  The people he freaked out but who didn't report anything? And would anything have happened if he hadn't had the (mis)fortune of access to wealth, and thanks to Australia's then lax gun laws, a cache of arms?

Caleb Landry Jones won the acting award at Cannes for his performance in NITRAM and it's well deserved. It's incredibly moving and nuanced - at once terrifying and heart-breaking. I was physically wincing in fear, but also believed Martin genuinely loved his mum and particularly his dad. Judy Davis is typically brilliant as Martin's mum and Anthony LaPaglia is heartbreaking as his dad. 

I also loved the choice to use a limited claustrophobic aspect ratio that makes us feel trapped by Martin in the hazy summer heat of dusty abandoned rooms. This is arguably Kurzel's most assured and impressive film to date. Kudos to all involved. 

NITRAM played Cannes 2021 where Caleb Landry Jones won Best Actor. It was released earlier this year in Australia. The film has a running time of 112 minutes.

MACBETH (2015)

Justin Kurzel's new adaptation of Shakespeare's violent tragedy is visually arresting, and beautifully scored by the director. The language may not always be as crisp and beautifully enunciated as a theatre production, but that is secondary to creating a film where emotion is conveyed on the face and physically, creating an atmosphere of tortured intentions and motivations that is rightly sinister and tragic. The result is a movie that isn't slavish to the text and has a unique vision of how this well-worn story should be told. 

MACBETH opens with husband and wife burying their children in a scene that makes explicit what many readers have often guessed at. It explains something of Lady Macbeth's language regarded her femininity and also how they would turn inward and pin all their hopes on a political future. Accordingly, they are ready for the seeds sown by the three witches - here not macabre obviously mystical creatures but deceptively straight-coward Scottish peasant-women. Shockingly quickly this turns into a murder plot that escalates and yet gives no satisfaction. 

Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard bring real depth and nuance to their performances as the couple ripped apart by mutual guilt and paranoia. But I almost feel that the performances are overshadowed by the general production design and cinematography. What I remember from this film aren't specific performances or even soliloquies but individual visual moments. Adam Arkapaw's cinematography is gorgeous. He captures a delicate sunlight through mist and fog. But at key moments in battle, director Justin Kurzel slows down the authentically grim battle footage with freeze-motion shots that look like tableaux. It's quite stunning and resurrects the use of a technique that Zack Snyder has done so much to cheapen. This is lush sensory film-making of the highest quality.

MACBETH has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Cannes 2015 and is currently on release in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland and Greece. The movie will open in Germany and Hungary on October 29th; in Iceland on November 6th; in Vietnam on November 13th; in France on November 18th; in Russia, Singapore, Mexico and Poland on November 27th; in South Korea, Lebanon, the USA, India, Kuwait, Bulgaria, Canada and Turkey on December 10th; in Argentina and Denmark on December 17th; in Bosnia, Brazil, Estonia, Spain, Finland and Norway on December 25th; in Italy and Sweden on January 6th 2016; in the Philippines and Chile on January 14th; in Indonesia on January 27th and in Japan in June.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 7 - SNOWTOWN

SNOWTOWN is a searing, brutal movie about Australia's most notorious serial killer. An assured and powerful debut feature from Australian writer-director Justin Kerzel - it contains scenes of such explicit torture that in the screening I attended, a dozen people walked out at around the seventy minute mark.  But the unflinching depiction of torture should not distract us from the intelligent and nuanced depiction of psychological manipulation that brought to the point where one powerful psychopathic personality could commandeer a crew of three of four young men all complicit in murder.  To that end, SNOWTOWN is fascinating not just as an examination of this particular case, but of all those cases in which a charismatic personality creates heinous gang behaviour - the Manson Family, for example.

The movie opens with Kerzel deftly establishing the poverty and claustrophobia of smalltown life, centring on the extended family of Elizabeth Harvey - her brood of step-siblings. They badly need a father figure and in walks charismatic apparent family man, John Bunting.  He immediately asserts his personality, cooks meals, asserts discipline, and the mother almost looks happy. But behind his almost cherubic, bearded, cuddly image, we soon learn that he is capable of snap judgements about who is a menace to society - mostly gays and paedos, a seemingly interchangeable category for him, but then junkies, bullies...anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time.  

For the first hour of the film, Kerzel exerts supreme self-discipline.  Bunting's power is shown in a couple of breath-taking set-piece scenes around the kitchen table. where he builds on the innate bigotry of his neighbours to whip up a lynch-mob frenzy.  We suspect he is already killing people but the only thing shown on screen is a still shot of a bathtub covered in bloody hand-prints from tortured victims - incredibly powerful. But then, in the second hour, Kerzel shows us exactly what has been happening starting with a scene where we see Bunting goad his girlfriend's teenage son James into participating in the torture of the boy who raped him.  That scene is necessary to show how a fragile boy could be psychologically broken, but the following scenes of torture did at times seem to verge on torture porn.

That's a small criticism, though, and shouldn't distract from the fact that this is a brilliantly crafted film (DP Adam Arkapaw - ANIMAL KINGDOM) that doesn't fall for the typical "police hunt serial killer" genre tropes. Rather it focuses on Bunting and his crew, what they did, and how they did it.  Daniel Henshall, despite his soft features and friendly face, is absolutely terrifying and magnetic as John Bunting. Late on, there's a scene where the camera looks at him head on sitting in a chair smiling. It's so sinister that we are petrified of what we will see when the camera pans round to show John's point of view.  That's the power of the performance. Young Lucas Pittaway as the James, the kid John manipulates, is also deeply sympathetic, although I was conscious throughout that the film, like the trial, was essentially based on his evidence. One wonders whether he really was such an unwilling and unwitting part of the gang.  At any rate, this is a must-see film, although be warned about the ultra-violence it contains.

SNOWTOWN played Cannes 2011 where it won the FIPRESCI Prize - Special Mention. It opened in Australia in May 2011 and opens in the UK on November 18th and in France on December 28th.