After the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in 2021, observers noted the parallels between far-right organizations like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and a group of violent extremists called the Order. The Order, which had splintered from the hate group Aryan Nations and aspired to wage a war against the federal government, was linked to multiple crimes that took place in the western United States throughout 1984, including armored-car robberies, a synagogue bombing and the killing of the Denver talk radio host Alan Berg.
“The Order” presents a dramatized version of those events with an ear toward their contemporary echoes. Adapted from a book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, who had been reporters for The Rocky Mountain News, the movie is directed by Justin Kurzel, an Australian whose output has shown a persistent, at times uneasy-making interest in real-life violence. In “The Snowtown Murders” (2012) and “Nitram” (2022), he sought to understand two cases of incomprehensible bloodshed in his home country by exploring them from the killers’ perspective.
Some of that interest in psychology is evident in “The Order,” scripted by Zach Baylin, which devotes much of its screen time to Robert Jay Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), the Order’s leader. He is portrayed as a charismatic fanatic who, dangerously, can put on a soothing front when the occasion demands it. (One of the most suspenseful scenes finds him faux-gently grilling a newcomer who has squealed.) He is depicted as too extreme for the Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), from whom he poaches followers, and has apparently charmed his way into playing family man to two women, his wife, Debbie (Alison Oliver) and Zillah, his pregnant mistress (Odessa Young).
But perhaps knowing that a concentrated wallow in Mathews’s world and white-supremacist views would be utterly repellent, “The Order” mostly splits its perspective between him and a fictitious F.B.I. agent, Terry Husk (a pleasingly gruff Jude Law), whose presence brings the movie closer to a conventional police procedural. There is even the usual subplot about how Husk is running from a botched mob case back east and misses his family.
Kurzel hits the familiar genre beats: Husk forges a friendly partnership with an Idaho sheriff’s deputy (Tye Sheridan) who has far more interest in investigating the local extremists than his feckless boss (Philip Granger). Jurnee Smollett quietly steals scenes even in the thankless role of a fellow F.B.I. agent who repeatedly informs Husk that he messed up.
The director knows how to stage a propulsive armored car robbery and a chase from a motel, and the sequence depicting the murder of Berg (Marc Maron) doesn’t shy from its sheer, bloody brutality. But the movie is more effective as a grim, involving cop thriller than it is as an ostensible statement on the Order’s reverberations in the present. The closing image depicts Husk as a determined hunter, in a moment that aims for ambiguity but also suggests that viewers can feel confident that someone will always be there to stare evil in the face.
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