The Order: Jude Law stars in a smouldering new thriller

Justin Kurzel’s latest film follows the FBI’s quest against a violent white separatist clan in the 1980s Pacific Northwest

In his latest film, Jude Law is a husk of a man: Terry Husk, to be exact. The British actor stars as a dried-out and world-weary FBI agent in Justin Kurzel’s smouldering new thriller, about the true-life thwarting of a violent white separatist clan in the 1980s Pacific Northwest. 
Kurzel is the gifted Australian director of Nitram, Macbeth and Snowtown. In The Order, which premiered at Venice this evening, he continues his ongoing fascination with off-the-grid domestic units that incubate expansive threats. Here, the unit in question is a survivalist commune, based on a remote farm in Washington State – or rather its still-more-radical offshoot after whom the film is named, who are busily working away to the blueprint set out in an underground race-war handbook. 
This unlovely lot is captained by Robert Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), a sullenly charismatic young firebrand who has long wearied of his pastor-slash-mentor’s Bible-thumping rhetoric. For Mathews, the time for action has arrived: there is currency to be forged; banks to be robbed; and munitions to be stockpiled with the proceeds. This means Husk’s professed desire for a quiet quasi-retirement must temporarily be put on hold.
How much does he really want the quiet, though? Kurzel’s film is part hard-bitten character study: Law’s Husk has been in the game so long that his principles have become muscle memory, and it often looks as if he’s working the case on instinct. (In the scene where he prepares to tail Mathews’ vehicle, his movements look almost automatic.) And that makes his relationship with his young protege (a terrific Tye Sheridan) conflicted. On the one hand, he admires the younger officer’s drive; on the other, he knows where it inevitably leads.
“Was it all worth it?” Husk’s superior (Jurnee Smollett) asks the older lawman at one point, about his lifetime of sacrifices for the job. And his gruff, canned response – “What do you think?” – leaves more room for interpretation than he perhaps intends.
But The Order also works as a gripping procedural in its own right – a long-form game of investigative join-the-dots, built around a series of lethally disciplined action scenes. When Mathews and his followers run an armoured car off the road, the sequence moves with the muscular self-assurance of a Christopher Nolan set-piece – it’s as if such scenes are machines, and the viewer is being fed through their cogs. 
The film takes care not to simplify the causes of The Order’s rise, and generally doesn’t reach for historical parallels. But there is a chilling charge to Kurzel’s choice to open the film on the Jewish talk radio presenter Alan Berg (Marc Maron) fielding an openly antisemitic call live on air – wittily demolishing it, too; not that it makes any odds. You flinch at such toxicity being openly (if anonymously) expressed on such a mainstream public platform, then remember social media exists.
Later on, a familiar image is glimpsed inside The Order’s own handbook: an actual tome called The Turner Diaries, published in 1978. It’s unclear if the illustration is historically accurate or was created for the film, but it shows a gallows and noose in front of a US government building – creepily prefiguring one of the more famous news images of the 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol.
“A book for the children,” is how pastor Butler (Victor Slezak) smilingly describes it when Law and Sheridan drop by the commune. Those five-year-olds would be in their mid-40s now.
Screening at the Venice Film Festival. A UK release has yet to be announced