The Order: Crime thriller a throwback to suspenseful, no-nonsense filmmaking

With everything happening in the world and at home right now, maybe the last thing you want to watch is a movie about neo-Nazis.

Who could blame you?

The prospect of a two-hour movie that will, inevitably, have images of Nazi symbols and dialogue that represents an abhorrent view, can be hard to stomach.

The Order has those things, though not in overabundance.

It is also a solid cat-and-mouse crime drama that, at no point, suggests its villains are anything other than villains. They are humanised, yes, but that’s because they’re humans. It gives no quarters to their philosophies.

The Order, starring Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult and Jurnee Smollett and directed by Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel is a compelling and well-crafted crime thriller that smartly uses genre tropes.

There are shoot-outs and surveillance, and hard-boiled cops who just want to get the bad guys.

The Order doesn’t deploy any fancy tricks or ingenious twists, in some ways, it’s an old-fashioned throwback. That’s what makes it such a satisfying film. It is exactly what it says it is, and it does it with class and discipline.

The film is based on the true story of how the FBI took down Bob Mathews, a white supremacist who in the early 1980s advocated for white separatism through violence and terrorism.

In The Order, Bob (Hoult) and his supporters have staged a series of robberies in the Pacific Northwest to fund their activities, which draws the attention of local cop Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan).

When Bowen shares his suspicions to FBI agent Terry Husk (Law), they start chasing down leads, which also includes an undetonated bomb found in a pornography shop another agent, Joanne Carney (Smollett), thinks might be related.

As played by Hoult, Bob is not just a moustache twirler. His convictions run deep and the character’s personal dramas – a wife (Alison Oliver) and a mistress (Odessa Young) vie for this attention — add a dimension.

Hoult is sporting the same bowl cut as he did as a kid in About a Boy. The unintentional evoking of that cherubic look sometimes bumps you out but then his steely eyes and hard-set jaw pulls you back in.

Perhaps the scariest aspect to the character is that he’s not terrifying. He’s also incredibly ordinary, and most of them are, despite their grandiosity and god complexes.

Bob Mathews had repellent views but we should never forget that people like him shouldn’t be “othered”. They are part of the human spectrum and it serves everyone better to understand them to counter them. No one starts out that way.

The film’s focus on white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries makes for an interesting post-viewing Wikipedia rabbit hole. The book also helps to connect Mathews’ exploits to later plots including the 1995 Oklahoma Bombing and the January 6 attack against the US Capitol.

The Order is a tight, gripping film, balancing suspense and action with the necessary mundane beats that breaks up the stress. Kurzel made it seem effortless because he hides the seams so well.

It’s not an imposing film nor is it a didactic one, but, surely, no one needs it explained why neo-Nazis are bad. Right?

Rating: 3.5/5

The Order is streaming on Prime Video