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.

DARK PLACES

On the back of the wild success of GONE GIRL and now the new TV miniseries SHARP OBJECTS, I was compelled to read Gillian Flynn's middle book - Dark Places - and was surprised to find that it had also received a big screen adaptation. I was even more surprised when I realised it had a stellar cast of big names, because it's release had utterly passed me by. Upon further investigation I realised that it had been horribly reviewed and went straight to video. Nonetheless, it's now available on a lot of pay per view streaming services so I decided to check it out. 

The plot of the film is remarkably faithful to the book which has - admittedly - a highly cinematic structure.  As with SHARP OBJECTS we open in the present day with a survivor of childhood trauma who will be our heroine. She's also falling apart - desperate for money, deeply emotionally scarred, self-medicating.  As with SO, she's sent back into her past to investigate a crime, except this time rather than being a journalist she's paid by a weird crime club of enthusiasts who believe that the testimony she gave as a child to convict her brother of murdering her mother and sisters was co-erced and that a grave injustice has been done.  And so the movie / book proceed by alternating scenes / chapters between the present day investigation and flashbacks to the day of the crime, culminating in a big reveal.

The plot is satisfyingly tricksy and gnarly and riffs off familiar topics from the WEST MEMPHIS THREE case - accusations of satan worship and child molestation. But as with all SO, I've come to believe that the point of Gillian Flynn's fiction is not so much whodunnit - it's perfectly possible to enjoy it having guessed that - but exploring the margins of American life - the people left behind by globalisation, suffering under bad debt and addiction, living from pay cheque to pay cheque and falling apart. It's this social observation of post financial crisis America that makes for compelling reading. That, and Flynn's eye for the grotesque - the stink and sounds and horror of life that other authors choose to avoid. She is a deeply visually impressive author.

And that's really the problem with this plot-faithful but atmosphere-blind adaptation. The director and production designers and costume designers just won't let it go grungy enough. Charlize Theron is also horribly miscast - this stunningly beautiful amazonian woman just doesn't look malnourished, maladjusted and on the poverty line. Her childhood just isn't dirty and shambolic enough.  Christina Hendricks admittedly does better at looking beaten down as her mother, but she has to look truly broken - a woman who would resort to the desperate - and she doesn't. The only people who really look perfect are Chloe Grace Moretz as the vampy teen girlfriend of the convicted man, and Drea De Matteo as a washed up stripper.  Otherwise this entire film just isn't gritty, grimy and grungy enough - and contrasts poorly with the production design and slippery memories of SHARP OBJECTS. 

DARK PLACE has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated R. It went straight to video in 2015.