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The Order (15)
Directed by Justin Kurzel
THIS is inspired by the chilling true story of the rise of a charismatic white supremacist leader in the early ’80s who devised a meticulous terror plot to overthrow the US government.
Based on The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, the film follows burnt out FBI Agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) who is convinced a series of bold yet increasingly violent daylight bank robberies and armoured car heists stretching from Washington to California in 1983 is the work of deadly domestic terrorists rather than a gang of criminals. The job is to fund the group’s war chest.
What ensues is an uber-tense cat and mouse thriller which pits the fictional Husk against cult leader Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) and the head of The Order, a new splinter group off the neonazi organisation Aryan Nations.
It becomes a race against time for Husk and his team to hunt down and stop Mathews and his extremist members before they reach their killer end game.
Directed by Justin Kurzel (Snowtown) from a screenplay by Zach Baylin it is a slow-burning painstaking crime drama set against stunning landscapes. The beauty of the backdrop is in contrast to the evil that abides there and personified by Mathews played superbly and chillingly by Hoult. Law, meanwhile, is sublime as the stoic and weary alcoholic Husk who is determined to catch him.
The film does not glamourise Mathews or his racist followers whose “Mein Kampf” was William Luther Pierce’s 1978 racist and anti-semitic novel The Turner Diaries, about a white supremacist insurrection that actually inspired the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and some of the Capitol rioters in 2021, according to the thriller. Pierce was the founder and chairman of the right-wing National Alliance.
There are some hair-raising moments which include the brutal assassination of Alan Berg in 1984, a popular Jewish radio DJ in Denver, and Mathews showing his young adopted son how to hold and fire a gun. Mathews looks on proudly when the youngster pulls the trigger.
Unbelievably more than 40 years on, after the murder of Berg, it seems that very little has changed. This forgotten, cautionary story is of particular relevance today.
In cinemas December 26.
