The Order review: a gripping true-crime thriller that will unsettle you

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“It’s a great country, but we’re all still trapped in our minds.” So says Alan Berg (Marc Maron), an impassioned radio host, while raging against his openly anti-Semitic callers in the opening minutes of The Order. It’s a fitting introduction to a true-crime thriller that’s as concerned with the adrenaline-pumping power of well-staged bank robberies and police chases as it is with the terrifying reality — both psychological and societal — of bigotry. You can live anywhere, but it takes far more than just packing your bags to see beyond the limits of your own perspective. When you refuse to do so, then even the idyllic, picturesque mountains and hills of the Pacific Northwest where The Order is set can become a breeding ground for vile hatred.

By the time the film begins, its central Idahoan small town has already become poisoned by the beliefs of its Neo-Nazi residents. When FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) wanders in from New York looking for a quieter life, his eyes inevitably find the white power poster hung up behind the counter of the first bar he walks into. Its placement is frightening on its own, but Terry is just as disturbed by the feeling that he’s arrived in a place where such blatant racial hatred is seen as a kind of everyday normalcy. The Order creates a skin-crawling discomfort in this scene, and it never lets it fade. Nor should it. This constant unease adds a cutting edge to the film, which succeeds at depicting not only the stomach-churning narcissism of white supremacy, but also the impossibility of ever really killing it.

Based on true events, The Order comes from King Richard screenwriter Zach Baylin and Nitram director Justin Kurzel. It charts the real-life FBI investigation into the film’s eponymous white supremacist militia group, led by the racist Bob Mathews (Juror #2‘s Nicholas Hoult). When Bob and his men begin robbing armored cars and banks, blowing up buildings, and killing talkative members of their own group, they quickly catch the attention of Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), a local police deputy who shares his suspicions about The Order and its plans with Law’s Husk shortly after he arrives. What ensues is a sweaty quest headed by Husk and fellow FBI agent Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett) to capture Bob and shut down The Order’s operations before the group has the chance to grow into an even worse domestic terror threat.

Several immaculately photographed, tense set pieces punctuate this conflict. These include a midday robbery of an armored truck that brings Husk blasting onto Mathews’ radar and a nighttime farmhouse raid that reaches haunting heights through the violence that is both depicted onscreen and left merely implied. As a filmmaker, Kurzel is no stranger to high-octane set pieces, having directed not only 2016’s forgettable Assassin’s Creed, but also 2015’s Macbeth, in which he brought Shakespeare’s tale of twisted hubris closer to the action movie realm than any other director before him. Here, Kurzel reteams with cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, who bathes The Order‘s action sequences in hazy shades of yellow and white sunlight that heighten the scenes and add a sickening kind of surrealness to them.

Kurzel has always been capable of making exceptional-looking thrillers. He’s a master of elevating B-grade genre movies through craft alone, and The Order is no exception. What makes the movie a worthwhile addition to his growing filmography, though, is its examination of indoctrination and white male rage. The latter is a theme Kurzel has repeatedly returned to over the years, whether it be in Nitram, True History of the Kelly Gang, or even his Michael Fassbender-led take on Macbeth. In The Order, he gets the chance to paint one of his most chilling portraits of male insecurity and violence yet. Baylin’s script, for starters, packs the film with white supremacist symbols, including Nazi flags and The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel about a fictional American insurrection that the FBI has previously labeled as the “bible of the racist right,” and Kurzel repeatedly returns to them throughout The Order.

Where the film mines most of its power from, though, is Hoult’s performance. The actor has proven himself in the past as a master at portraying a distinctly male, feeble kind of evil. The conniving, self-absorbed natures of his previous villains have, however, always been offset — and often comically — by Hoult’s own boyish face and rail-thin frame. Those qualities aren’t just still present in The Order, but they’re magnified by his character’s unkempt, farmboy haircut and practically prepubescent belief in the white supremacist doctrines he has adopted. But, as the real-life Mathews, Hoult also seems more formidable than he ever has before. His ability to evoke a very specific, pathetic malevolence becomes a source of uncomfortable horror when it’s coupled in The Order with acts of violence and an embittered way of thinking that, unfortunately, still seem disturbingly familiar.

The Order explores the origins of Mathews’ racist ideology and the circumstances of his indoctrination without casting an even remotely sympathetic light on the character. Instead, it forces viewers to confront the absurd horror of its antagonist’s beliefs and witness how Mathew’s insistence that his white birthrights have been stolen from him becomes an excuse to unleash his anger upon the world. It’s an unpleasant, discomforting experience watching The Order unfold, and every second spent with Mathews and his fellow Neo-Nazis just makes the viewer root even more for their downfall. This righteous desire for justice does a lot to keep The Order‘s audience emotionally invested and cover up the almost by-the-numbers nature of its central FBI investigation.

Sporting a bushy mustache that would make Gene Hackman proud, Jude Law does his best Popeye Doyle impression as Husk, a federal agent who gets so caught up in his hunts that his body literally reacts with occasional nosebleeds. Law is unsurprisingly convincing as a hard-drinking investigator whose long-unquenched thirst to actually catch one of his targets seems powerful enough to destroy him from the inside out. But Baylin’s script is ultimately too busy filling out the real-life details and motivations of The Order‘s white supremacist villains to make Law’s Terry, as well Smollett’s Carney and Sheridan’s Bowen, more than stock investigator archetypes. While The Order never has trouble ratcheting up the tension and intensity when it needs to, the film is also decidedly more low-key and somber than some genre-movie enthusiasts may expect before they see it.

This is largely by design, as The Order tries in its final third to communicate how fully extinguishing something like white supremacy requires not just ceaseless law enforcement efforts, but also a level of introspection and personal responsibility that its proponents inherently lack. Its causes are, more often than not, clear, and its practitioners rarely feel the need to hide themselves and their beliefs. But there is a very big difference, as The Order mournfully acknowledges in its purposefully unfulfilling epilogue, between having something in your sights and actually being able to kill it once and for all. That is a difficult truth for The Order to grapple with, and the film never truly emerges as an unforgettable, full-throated cinematic expression of it.

But even if The Order never manages to reach its highest possible pitch, the one it does strike is startling and distressing in equal measure. For much of its runtime, it’ll thrill you and get your pulse pounding. In the end, though, it’ll leave you quiet, shaken, and, above all else, angry.

The Order is now playing in select theaters.