When it comes to depicting real-life violence on screen, Australian director Justin Kurzel has an enviable history of such. His 2011 debut, Snowtown, was a harrowing re-enactment of the South Australian body-in-a-barrel murders that plagued the 90s for close to a decade. In 2021 he represented the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre through the psychologically taxing Nitram. And in between, such takes on historical fables as Macbeth in 2015 and True Story of the Kelly Gang in 2019 expressed his penchant for fusing storytelling with a barbarous temperament.
The Order is no exception.
A tense reflection on American violence, Kurzel lays focus on the neo-Nazi movement that terrorised 1980s Pacific Northwest. An adaptation of the 1989 non-fiction book “The Silent Brotherhood” by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, Zach Baylin‘s weighty script switches viewpoints between the law and the radicalised frontman of an armed brotherhood robbing banks and executing bombings across Washington. There’s a sense of a parallel narrative almost as FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) and the charismatic Bob Matthews (Nicholas Hoult), the crime leader, prove two men both committed to their cause, ready to risk their lives and their families in the process.
On the cusp of being entirely burnt out, Husk arrives to a near-empty FBI office with little more than determination, having already taken on the KKK and the Sicilian Mafia. Teaming up with local officer Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), who has some personal connections to the gang, the intent on uncovering who The Order is and what their plans are grows exponentially as a manhunt forms, resulting in 114 minutes of white-knuckle logicality that further speaks to Kurzel’s masterful precision in handling grounded atrocity.
Similar to Kurzel’s previous works, The Order, as topical as it proves and unsettling it can be in its accounts, is never a film that feel gratuitous in its violent nature. It’s telling a certain subsect of American history, and as we are informed during the film’s closing scrawl, the idea of The Order have maintained a certain hold on country violence across the decades since, despite its dissolution; the January 6th Capitol Attack believed to be carried out as a form of declaration.
A meaningful action film that echoes today’s divisive identity, bolstered by a hardended Law, a magnetic Hoult, and an emotionally anchored Sheridan, The Order is a chilling fable of the past that can’t help but have audiences question how many steps forward have truly been taken.
FIVE STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The Order screened as part of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which ran between September 5th and 15th, 2024. For more information about the festival, head to the official site here.
