Although it depicts events that took place in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1980s, Justin Kurzel’s The Order feel all too timely in the Trump Era, when white supremacists have felt more and more comfortable emerging from the shadowy margins and taking their rhetoric centerstage. And, as the events of January 6 made all too clear, there is a not-small faction of the American population who are perfectly comfortable with the idea of engaging in armed insurrection to overthrow the government if an election doesn’t go their way. The intersection of those two forms of fanaticism—racial purity and rabid nationalism—make for a particularly fetid brew of hateful violence, which is precisely what unfolded in upstate Washington in 1983 and 1984 when a splinter group of the Aryan Nation known as The Silent Brotherhood or The Order executed a series of audacious bank robberies and armed-car heists to fund what they hoped would turn into a national revolution.

Using the 1989 book The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt as his basis, screenwriter Zach Baylin (King Richard, Creed III) centers the story on a composite FBI agent named Terry Husk (Jude Law), a grizzled, cynical professional who is assigned to investigate a series of brazen daytime bank robberies in the Pacific Northwest. He partners with a deputy police officer, Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), who grew up in the area and knows the locals, which is why he suspects that the robberies are being perpetrated by the secretive white supremist group of the title. Terry is initially skeptical because armed robberies don’t the fit the established patterns of white supremist organizations, but the more he investigates, the more convinced he becomes.

The Order is run by Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), a handsome, seemingly soft-spoken ideologue who, like any good cult leader, attracts lost, eager young men and women to his cause with charisma and promises of belonging. Law’s performance as Terry, the composite law enforcer, is tough and tenacious and unlike anything you have seen him play before, but it is Hoult’s portrayal of Mathews, a singular real-life figure, that really draws you in. It is easy in theory to step back and say we would never be taken in by ideas so repugnant as those that Mathews espouses, but Hoult makes his character’s ideology and his cause seem not just defensible, but appealing. His intensity of purpose combined with his apparent lack of outward aggression make him the ultimate snake-oil peddler, luring in the despondent and downbeat and manipulating them to his own twisted ends. He is just at home reading William Luther Pierce’s 1978 racist novel The Turner Diaries (which helped to inspire Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing in 1995) to his children as he is organizing and executing bank robberies.

Australian-born director Justin Kurzel has been drawn to similar material in the past. The violence and power dynamics at work in The Order are also in evidence in his take on Macbeth (2015) with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard; Nitram (2021), a dramatization of the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre in Tasmania; and The Snowtown Murders (2011), another true-life story of multiple murders in Australia. He directs The Order with an eye toward grit and realism, making it look and feel like something Sidney Lumet might have made in the mid-1970s. Even when it slips into some conventional melodramatic plotting, it never feels less than point-blank in its assessment of how far we can fall into modes of tribalism and hatred, making it all too pertinent for the here and now.

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