Blue jeans, white T-shirt, pickup truck and angel face: on the surface, Bob Matthews (Nicholas Hoult) has everything of the typical American. Impossible to guess, by meeting him at dinner, that he is the dangerous leader of an armed neo-Nazi faction. And that is precisely the objective. In The Orderbased on a true story and adapted from the book The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt (published in 1989), Australian director Justin Kurzel tells the story of the hunt for Bob Matthews and his group of white supremacists in the American Northwest in 1984.
Presented in competition at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, the film follows Terry Husk (Jude Law), a disillusioned FBI agent who moves to a small town in Washington State (northwestern United States) to investigate the nationalist group and quickly recruits a young police officer, Jamie Bowen (the excellent Tye Sheridan), to help him. A seasoned veteran with unconventional methods, who takes under his wing a young idealist: The Order allows itself some archetypes of the police thriller. But with its dry and effective narrative, Justin Kurzel (Macbeth, Assassin’s Creed, Nitram) carefully avoids sensationalism and instead focuses on telling the story of an extremism that hides in broad daylight.
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No burning of crosses
While Bob Matthews’ ideology is not far removed from that of the Ku Klux Klan, the methods of the members of the neo-Nazi group The Order are, on the other hand, more discreet, which explains why the FBI, in the film, has so much trouble getting their hands on them. In the only scene in the film where we see a cross burning, the leader immediately reprimands his henchmen and asks for it to be extinguished, so as not to attract attention.
Bob Matthews understood that to achieve his goals, he had to blend into the background. A likely difference of opinion with Richard Butler, founder of the Aryan Nationsorganisation white supremacist group based a few miles away. The latter, who takes a dim view of Bob Matthews’ charisma, operates from a camp where children give Hitler salutes and rooftops are covered in giant swastikas. However, his day-to-day inaction and good relations with the local government frustrate the young Bob Matthews, who is determined to overthrow the American government and “reclaiming the land promised to our ancestors”.
Nicholas Hoult stars as Bob Matthews, the leader of the racist, anti-Semitic, white supremacist and nationalist organization The Order. | Michelle Faye / AGC Studios, Riff Raff Entertainment, Chasing Epic Pictures
The group The Order actually takes its name from a fictional book, titled Turner’s Notebooksused as a manual of action by white supremacists. Justin Kurzel, who rose to fame with the highly disturbing The Snowtown Crimes (2011), does not shy away from showing the sometimes extreme violence of the crimes committed by the group. But the film is also and above all interested in the heart of the matter: patiently and without any fanfare, the members of the group recruit, plan and carry out methodical fundraising (in reality robberies) that allow them to finance the operations and accumulate weapons.
Two Americas
The group’s racist, anti-Semitic, and reactionary ideology (and the locals’ complacency) may not be as obvious as a white sheet and a pointy hat, but it’s still there, in the background. Consider the barely disguised contempt some characters have for Officer Joanne Carney (played by Jurnee Smollett), the racist leaflets plastered in local bars, the very low number of women at rallies, or the everyday misogyny instilled in the group (“I’m so sorry it’s not a boy”Bob Matthews’ mistress apologizes after giving birth to their daughter).
Instead of immediately antagonizing Bob Matthews, the film draws a clear and disturbing parallel between the supremacist and the cop on his tail, Terry Husk. Two lovers of hunting and the great outdoors, two idealistic, stubborn and charismatic men, who could have been neighbors but nevertheless chose opposite directions. A way of emphasizing that the members of these extremist groups are not diabolical and isolated deranged people. They are ordinary men, perfectly integrated into American society.
Jude Law, Jurnee Smollett and Tye Sheridan star as police officers hunting down the white supremacist group The Order in Justin Kurzel’s film of the same name. | Michelle Faye / AGC Studios, Riff Raff Entertainment, Chasing Epic Pictures
Justin Kurzel paints a portrait of a country deeply divided, red on one side, blue on the other, America’s heartland against that of the coasts. The cinematography contrasts the breathtaking beauty of the wide open spaces of the Northwest with the dark, bland, and stifling rooms in which the members of the group gather. The film’s most resounding moments are not its action sequences, but those that underscore this original fracture.
In a scene as well written as it is played, the Native American wife of police officer Jamie, Kimmy (Morgan Holmstrom), explains to Terry that she has lived her entire life in the same house, like the rest of her family before her. Through this character, the only real source of life and color in the film, Justin Kurzel recalls the true identity of the “traditional” America that the racist members of The Order claim.
The film ends on a note explaining that the novel Turner’s Notebooks continues to be used as a manifesto and to inspire acts of domestic terrorism, including the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC A chilling epilogue, thirty years after the events reported, while Donald Trump is once again a candidate for the White House.
