‘The Order’: Venice Review

Dir: Justin Kurzel. Canada. 2024. 116mins 

Taking a cue from its protagonist, a grizzled FBI agent who lets nothing stop him from getting his man, The Order is lean and efficient. This real-life crime-thriller from Australian director Justin Kurzel (Nitram, True History Of The Kelly Gang) traces the US federal government’s attempts to eradicate a dangerous white supremacist group in the Pacific Northwest during the mid-1980s, with Jude Law impressing as the lead lawman. There are conventional elements to this story, but also a level of craft that keep the proceedings reliably taut — especially when Kurzel unleashes another excellent chase sequence or shootout. 

Always skillfully choreographed but never showy

The film, which premieres in Competition at Venice, opens in the US on December 6, hoping to offer a sharp genre alternative to the awards-season fare that will be packing out the multiplex. Law is joined by Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan and Jurnee Smollett, who all provide strong supporting work.

Law plays Terry, an ageing FBI agent who, in 1983, moves from New York to Idaho, his wife and daughters remaining back on the East Coast. Seeking a quieter life with less stressful assignments, he becomes aware of a faction of far-right militants who have broken off from a local Aryan Nation sect to form their own organisation, known as The Order. Led by Bob Mathews (Hoult), The Order robs banks in order to fund their deadly domestic terrorism. Aided by inexperienced Deputy Bowen (Sheridan), Terry is determined to bring them to justice.

Based on the nonfiction book The Silent Brotherhood, Kurzel’s follow-up to 2021’s Nitram is a straightforward procedural in which Terry hunts The Order, who operate covertly somewhere in the Pacific Northwest’s thick forests. Kurzel keeps this game of cat and mouse moving at a steady pace, focusing on Terry and Bowen’s investigative work and The Order’s increasingly audacious criminal enterprises. 

Fans of Kurzel’s previous pictures — especially Macbeth and True History Of The Kelly Gang — will recognise The Order’s blunt-force momentum and disinterest in extraneous details. Despite being a true story, the film does not spend much time dissecting The Order’s toxic mindset or Matthews’ twisted evil. Quite the contrary, The Order takes these as givens, instead invested in how the FBI unravels the organisation’s plan, leading to a series of exciting, violent altercations between Terry and the militants.

Always skillfully choreographed but never showy, the action set pieces exude a raw intensity. Kurzel emphases his characters’ humanness as they run, drive and shoot with abandon, occasionally making mistakes or behaving in a realistic, clumsy fashion. The sequences’ immediacy is only amplified by Nick Fenton’s forceful editing, which plays up the unpredictability of these tense moments.

Law fully embodies an agent whose failures haunt him both physically and emotionally. Terry does not want to talk about his family or the medication he takes that causes him nosebleeds — clearly, he is a man who pours himself into his job because it’s the one area of his life where he has control. Now in his early 50s, Law long ago shed the cocky swagger of his initial career, and he plays Terry with a cold pragmatism that leaves room for nothing that stands in the way of his objective — including fellow agent Joanne (Smollett), an old friend who doubts his ability to take on such a physically demanding case. 

No one will be surprised that Terry and Bowen form a predictable ’wizened veteran/impressionable rookie’ partnership — and likewise, Kurzel positions Terry and Matthews as de rigueur epic adversaries who will square off mano-a-mano. The echoes of more striking crime-thrillers course through this picture. But The Order stands out thanks to its subtler choices. Because it involves a right-wing hate group this story might be aiming for topicality, but Hoult intentionally depicts Matthews without fanfare or magnetism. Hardly intended to serve as a terrifying symbol for a larger movement in our society, this cult leader is nothing more than a dull reactionary, and Kurzel similarly underplays other narrative elements. Most notably, Terry is not overtly heroic but, rather, dogged and fiery, and the race to track down The Order is orchestrated plainly. 

Such a muted approach may drain The Order of some vitality, but in its place is a grim dutifulness that is, in its own way, affecting. Both the cops and the robbers simply go about their business, their collision preordained.