Justin Kurzel directs with a scalpel that cuts everywhere except the heart. The Australian filmmaker, who memorialized two mass killing events in his own country with his coldly compelling debut “The Snowtown Murders” and 2021 Cannes winner “ Nitram ,” peeks this time into the American psyche behind similar happenings with his latest, “The Order.” But he needs fresher material, as this based-on-a-true-story portrait of a radicalized white supremacy faction being hunted by the FBI in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s feels too close to Kurzel’s previous outings, which also include the Aussie bushranger historical biopic “ True History of the Kelly Gang .” He already depicted a white, manifesto-wielding killer the last time. And that other time. And the time before that. While it’s one thing for a director to present variations on a theme throughout their career, it’s another when they stop surprising us or finding a new way into the same story.
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As skillful a director as he is — and “The Order” is not without some well-orchestrated action set pieces and at least two wounding shots that echo the most gutting kills in a Michael Mann joint — this bloody, soul-killed dirge of a movie does not suggest a vision interested in anything but the same already-trodden topic. Nor is it interested in human beings other than in how they can advance an onscreen political cry of the soul. “The Order” is also hampered by a miscast Nicholas Hoult, who’s worked with Kurzel before to better results, as a Charismatic Cult Leader who’s never as menacing as he should be.
Well-cast, though, is Jude Law as demon-addled Idaho FBI agent Terry Husk, tasked in 1983 with taking down an Aryan brotherhood led by Hoult’s Bob Mathews. Terry pops pills, chainsmokes, boozes, and has a vaguely shaped family life he prefers to keep in a drawer. In this grimly self-serious film’s only hilarious scene, Terry is asked: “Do you love your daughters?” Hesitation. “Care for them?” Blank stare; come again? There is a bookending metaphor that doesn’t land involving Terry hunting a moose, the CGI makings of which will put a frown on your face, but Law is still effective as a man haunted enough by himself to channel his self-loathing into fighting humanity’s worst. Here is a man who wakes up with a gushing noseblood but shrugs it off as just part of the morning routine.
A novel called “The Turner Diaries,” written in 1978 by white nationalist and neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce, is going around that portends a race war. And the events depicted therein are eerily similar to bank robberies, carjackings, and murders happening in the United States’ most northwest corridor. When Terry’s FBI contingent, reviewing that text as evidence, mentions “storming the Capitol” as one possible outcome in the it’s-all-suddenly-coming-true narrative of the book, cue the knowing, self-reassuring laughter in the audience as it congratulates itself for recognizing the prescience onscreen. Obviously, Kurzel, working from a script written by “King Richard” Oscar nominee Zach Baylin, wanted to mine the timeliness of this material. Again, something he’s done before, especially with the help of Caleb Landry Jones’ exceptional performance as a notorious Australian mass shooter in “Nitram.”
Meanwhile, the crazed Bob Mathews (Hoult) is recruiting young men with prejudiced tendencies of their own to join his revolution toward racial purity. (One eventual charge’s sob story about being rejected by a Black person evokes the mindset of a Hitler follower.) This commences an uprising of domestic terror attacks that Kurzel indeed has a hell of a time staging — “The Order” kicks off with a nerve-tightening bank heist before exhibiting Bob’s acolytes’ other criminal activity. Of those assassinated by Bob’s group called The Order include Jewish radio host Alan Berg (a weirdly cast Marc Maron), which is more than enough to spur the FBI, finally, back into action amid a years-long chase.
Kurzel seems to be interrogating and subverting Hoult’s earnest, sweetie-pie charisma in turning the talented actor into a neo-Nazi onscreen. But Bob is never a nefarious enough villain — nor does “The Order” fully set up how he and Terry might be the dark mirrors of one another — to inspire Anton Chigurh levels of chills in your seat. “No Country for Old Men” is surely a movie on “The Order’s” mind, as well as other American thriller classics, especially in long takes that follow Terry with a gun in his hand. On paper, the idea of Kurzel grafting his sensibility onto an American genre isn’t without potential.
Something’s missing, though. The implied sickening backdrop of Bob’s world and the fanatical minions he lures into his orbit is more intriguing than the FBI procedural that rules the film, with Terry taking rising fed Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan) under his broken wing. Polygamy seems to be integral to Bob’s masterminding plan for the propagation of whiteness, though when one of his harem casts quibbling doubt over Bob training their small child in the arts of a firearm, it feels jammed in, moral ambiguity for its own propped-up sake.
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It’s fruitless to compare one movie to another, but Kurzel more immersively explored a scary criminal milieu with “True History” and its gang of cross-dressing, face-powder-slathered miscreants. How do I say this: a movie about neo-Nazis should be more evil-soaked than “The Order” is. And this film could’ve used more of a female perspective, with the promising actor Odessa Young wasted as what is basically one of Bob’s breeders. So is Jurnee Smollett as Terry’s FBI colleague, a worrying wisp of a woman washed out by the film’s more invested interest in tormented machismo, and how the roots of male violence poison the well of the world.
Though there is great stuff here, from Adam Arkapaw’s wide-lens cinematography to Nick Fenton’s crisply clipped editing and Kurzel’s brother Jed’s pulse-quickening (if sometimes overemphasized) electro score. Kurzel is a superb filmmaker at the craft level, but to what ends when the movie often hangs on the screen like a fresco mural in suspension?
Finale closing cards state that “The Turner Diaries” ended up inspiring nation-shattering far-right coups like America’s own on January 6, and this film is, sure, a sobering reminder of the dangers of radicalized thought, fanaticism, all of that, and the federal government’s incompetence to manage its twisted outpourings. But don’t the only people bound to see this movie already know that, with Kurzel’s film not just telling us how to feel but also reminding us of what we already do? “The Order” is one of those : yet another Movie We Need Now, but the director inadvertently makes the case that maybe we don’t.
Grade: C
“The Order” world premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. Vertical Entertainment has U.S. distribution rights and will release the film December 6.
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