Few modern thinkers have reached as powerful and concise a conclusion on what happens to a society subjected to the weaponisation of knowledge as Brazilian educator Paulo Freire: “When education doesn’t lead to liberation, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor.” Little did Freire know that, two decades later, a man in the American Pacific Northwest would use a very similar maximum to justify the desire of the uneducated oppressor to take down the oppressed.
That man was Robert Jay Mathews, the founder of the white supremacist organisation that lends its name to Justin Kurzel’s The Order. In a 1984 letter declaring war on the Federal Government of the United States, Mathews explained his racially motivated attack as a desire to “quit being the hunted and become the hunter.” This hunting analogy sits at the heart of Kurzel’s take on the cop procedural, a captivating game of cat and mouse chronicling the downfall of The Order and the rise of Nazi-inspired ideology in the US in the 80s.
Of course, a police procedural needs a tormented copper whose overly demanding career has cost him a once-loving family, and Jude Law fills this role as ageing FBI Agent Terry Husk. The veteran arrives at a small town to investigate a series of violent robberies but ends up heading a large operation to catch Nicholas Hoult’s Bob Mathews, who executed the robberies to fund his ambitious plan to kickstart a violent race war in America and establish white power. Tye Sheridan completes the trio, playing yet another well-meaning rookie willing to walk down a dangerous path to please an emotionally distant mentor in Deputy Jamie Bowden.
As an entry to the procedural genre, The Order proves a competently realised affair. Kurzel’s longtime collaborator Adam Arkapaw captures the American Northwest in all its vastness, with the sinewy roads nested within the mountains proving the only way in or out of this no man’s land where hatred is allowed to fester away from prying eyes. Law plays against type as the scruffy Husk, a downtrodden officer drained of joy by the horrors of his vocation and functioning on a tricky mix of spite and rage, while Hoult embodies the particular kind of charm that allows the cruellest of people to reign over the most gullible. The cast is rounded by a roster of rising stars in Jurnee Smollett as a Black FBI agent navigating the personal ripples of the case and Alison Oliver as Mathews’ wife Debbie, a refreshing portrayal of a criminal’s partner that bypasses the cliché of the passive housewife unable to detach herself from a man she knows to be bad news.
For those heading into The Order hoping for another dose of Kurzel’s violent brand of social realism, however, tough luck. This is not the Australian backlands, and The Order sees the director at his most tame, with few violent sequences interspersed through a tense thriller that favours large ethical questionings over the minutiae of heinous crimes. The horror here comes from seeing the seismic consequences of an ideology that feels closer to newspaper headlines than history books, knowing far too well that figureheads die, but words live on, with new self-serving grifters always waiting in the wings, spouting the same old hateful rhetoric.
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