If you ignore the Assassin’s Creed adaptation – and it’s better for us all if we do – Justin Kurzel has one of the finest hit rates of any auteur to emerge in the last two decades, his obsession with violent men and the miserable, confusing messes they leave in their wake making for some of the punchiest and most thrilling ‘arthouse’ films of recent years. To this exceptional list we can now add The Order, a wildly entertaining and stunningly well-crafted late-breaking contender for film of the year looking at America’s militant far-right in an old-school cops and robbers thriller made all the more engrossing by the fact that these robbers are also Nazis.
Working from the non-fiction book The Silent Brotherhood, Kurzel and writer Zach Baylin here tell the story of the eponymous Order, a white supremacist militant group working out of the Pacific Northwest in the early ‘80s, robbing banks and armoured trucks to fund their transformation into a full-blown domestic terror group. Led by Robert Matthews (Nicholas Hoult, who gave the best performance of his career for Kurzel in The True History of the Kelly Gang and has had just a hell of a 2024), they make for fantastic villains, evil to the core and competent enough to be actually frightening.
Fighting back is ageing FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law), whose commitment to and capability at his job (he arrives having spent a career facing down the Mafia and the KKK) is undercut by the fact that he’s an adult man prone to nosebleeds. It’s one of a thousand superb little touches that Kurzel and Baylin put in to The Order without ever overplaying any of them – there’s little-to-no messing about in this taut story that knows exactly what’s important and what can be left for the audience to figure out themselves.
Shootouts are swift and brutal and feel authentic, everyone involved stressed and exhausted immediately with the vast majority of bullets fired zipping away into no target at all. Law and Hoult are both excellent at showing how even the ‘leaders’ of a war like this can easily be in over their heads, sweaty and nervous and yet still getting a mighty kick out of it, a paradoxical glee in getting near death. Terry often looks very small against the uncaring backdrops of Washington state, and though The Order doesn’t really interrogate the ideology of its villains, it doesn’t really need to. One single scene at an Aryan Brotherhood meeting is incredible in the way it makes these people look entirely, even hilariously, pathetic without losing sight of how dangerous and hateful this snivelling loserdom makes them.
You couldn’t call The Order the most original film of the year, but I personally loved the way it uses the tropes of its genre as efficient shorthand. There’s barely a wasted line here, you know exactly what you need to about all the supporting characters – from Tye Sheridan as the young and idealistic local cop to Jurnee Smollett as Terry’s hard-bitten ex-FBI partner – from the second you meet them, perfect little chess pieces for Kurzel to move around this dark yet gorgeous world.
And it is gorgeous, Kurzel and DP Adam Arkapaw really outdoing themselves. The Order looks *great*, the stunning wilderness (Canada doubling for the American settings) captured in grand yet slowly lurching shots that make it look as if the entire landscape is shifting beneath the feet and car wheels of the characters. At ground level it’s even better – alongside Furiosa and La Chimera, The Order has the best colour grade of the year. Without any overly fussy stylings, every frame pops with a hypnotic brightness and crisp contrasts (see, for example, an early hiking scene in which the ruddy red of Law’s face plays off against the deep green of his winter jacket) and there are a couple of sequences here which look more Michael Mann than even Ferrari did last year.
Add to this the haunting score, and the world of The Order is, if not quite an inviting one, one it’s hard to let go of. After spending most of his career in his homeland of Australia – with one mighty successful trip to Scotland for his fabulous Macbeth – Kurzel’s first real dive into the US is a pure triumph. It’s the sort of muscular and quietly clever action-thriller that is all too rare these days and perhaps the highest compliment I can pay The Order is that it could stand proudly beside any of the ‘80s and ‘90s classics it’s hearkening back to.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 