“The Order” is based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s 1989 non-fiction book The Silent Brotherhood about the anti-government, white nationalist terrorist organization founded in the 1980s Pacific Northwest by Bob Mathews. In director Justin Kurtzel’s cinematic version, working from a screenplay by Zach Baylin, Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) is tracked by a fictional FBI agent, Terry Husk (Jude Law), while splintering from the Aryan Nation, recruiting fellow self-perceived white victims, and fundraising for his new order via armed robbery to incite a race war. There are occasional moments of genuinely chilling insight into this world, like Bob reading his child The Turner Diaries as a bedtime story, but it also feels as if Kurtzel is purposely skirting the edges of the organization, content to have a few lines of dialogue outline it in broad strokes but refusing to open the whole pandora’s box lest the movie itself be viewed as a manual. Instead, “The Order” falls back on well-staged if rote heist sequences, betraying it as a thriller more than a docudrama, underlined in Husk.
Like his on-the-nose name, this character is pure cop movie stock, hoping to win back his estranged wife and see his daughter again, provided with a likeminded partner of sorts (Tye Sheridan) destined to die (spoiler alert). And yet, Law is something else, coloring in the hoary lines with rich aplomb, taking that wife/daughter subplot as seriously as a spiritually fried cop might, playing moment after moment with a weary smirk that seems to come from so deep within it invests a silent and unexpected profundity. He becomes a rich counterpoint to the boyish Hoult, his omnipresent white t-shirt chillingly echoing his bright blue eyes, never going over the top and by extension never intimating to the audience that he stands outside of what he’s playing. It put me in the mind of Bruce Springsteen assuming the point-of-view of a similar character in a song he cut the same year “The Order” is set, as a matter of fact, the song the people who don’t know all the words to “Born in the U.S.A.” probably never knew existed, the one so plainspokenly terrifying it still hasn’t been officially released and probably never will.