Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult face off in solid crime thriller “The Order”

The latest from director Justin Kurzel explores the extremism of a white supremacist group.

Cut from the same cloth as BlackKklansman and Judas and the Messiah, The Order is the latest crime thriller inspired by little-known historical events.

It tells the story of Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), the extremist leader of a white nationalist group intent on starting a race war. FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law) has ostensibly moved to Idaho to take it easy, but he can't resist sniffing around the cases of a string of robberies and bombings that he believes have ties to the Aryan Nation organization. Teaming up with local deputy Jamie (Tye Sheridan), they uncover Bob's plot and seek to bring him down.

Justin Kurzel (Macbeth) directs with a keen eye for character and a deep understanding of the importance of setting. He uses the stark beauty of the Pacific Northwest to juxtapose the untouched loveliness of the natural world with the ugliness of man. There's a clear influence from the pace and tone of heist movies like Michael Mann's Thief and the more lilting cinematography of True Detective. It's a taut, crisply plotted and paced yarn that leaves just enough air for you to ponder the awful parallels to our own time.

Law, who is at the Toronto Film Festival with both this and Eden, is compelling as Terry, an alcoholic who hopes his move will allow him to reconnect with his family — but he's just as addicted to the job as the drink. The actor sinks into the grizzled husk of a man, lending him a hollowness that suggests Terry has seen too much to ever find peace outside a life of pursuing justice.

Law rarely gives a bad performance, and he certainly always commits to a part with vigor. Terry is one of his more interesting leading roles of late, and he fits nicely into the milieu of a crime thriller/detective story (get him a prestige TV show, stat). In his hands, Terry walks with a haunted quality that makes the character almost feel Shakespearean.

He's surrounded by strong performances as well. Hoult has remarkable range as a performer, and here, he forgoes his ample charm and wit to create a portrait of hate. His Bob is not the type of extremist leader who woos followers with pretty words and promises. Instead, he possesses a preternatural stillness, prowling through scenes like a reptilian creature, utterly cold-blooded. He sells the vociferousness of Bob's convictions while lending the man a hypnotic quality that converts others to his cause, dubbed simply The Order.

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Both Sheridan and Jurnee Smollett have smaller but memorable roles in the film. Sheridan's Jamie has a quiet courage and sense of moral rectitude, which contrasts with Terry's more erratic approach to police work. In a sea of disturbed people, he is a pillar of decency. As Sheridan ages out of the teenage roles of his early career, he has started to bring a stolid masculinity to his characters while still maintaining an edge that suggests there's something different about the men he plays. But it is Jamie who acts as the conduit for the audience as well, highlighting how he is consumed by the case and his pursuit of justice just as the men who join The Order are in their hunt for their own twisted version of what they believe is right. He is the story's tragic hero, beset from all sides.

Smollett is fierce as Joanne Carney, a fellow agent rooting for Terry to hang it up and live out his days in peace. Smollett makes Joanne small but mighty, mixing her frustration with Terry's inability to quit and her own adrenaline-junkie nature. In Joanne, we see how the electric rush of fighting crime dovetails with a desire to see justice done. She is Terry before he saw too much.

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MarcMaron also has a brief but crucial role, playing, of all things, a talk radio host, Alan Berg. It was Berg's 1984 assassination that drew attention to The Order and the historical events depicted in the film. Maron largely is playing an iteration of himself, decrying anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance on his radio show and cutting down those who espouse such beliefs. But it's a deeply powerful performance in the ways he so quickly conveys the gaps between well-intentioned ideological discourse and the violent viewpoints of extremists.

Kurzel, working from a script by Gary Gerhardt and Zach Baylin, offers audiences a well-made thriller that joins a handful of other films on the fall festival circuit in a resurgence of middle-of-the-road adult dramas that are less awards bait than purely well-produced, well-acted entertainment. The Order is the kind of movie studios once made on the regular in the 1970s and early 1980s (which is fitting considering the film is set between 1983 and 1984).

The extremists that followed Bob Mathews were indoctrinated via a book titled The Turner Diaries, which was first published in 1978. The book, a real title, is a novel that depicts the overthrow of the U.S. federal government and an ensuing race war. The FBI has previously referred to the book as the "bible of the racist right," and though Diaries has perhaps received less press than it did around the era of the events of this film, it has disturbing ties to nationalist ideology today.

As Terry studies the book, he realizes that The Order is using it as a guide, outlining six steps for their own aims to raise a militia and overthrow the government — step 6, the day of the rope, features an illustration with a scaffold set up in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol building, and it is no accident that it could be an artist's rendering of the events of Jan. 6.

In many ways, The Order is a character study, showcasing how obsession and ego drive Terry and Bob to very different ends. They are two sides of the same coin in many ways: one for good and one for evil. But the film is also a chilling slice of historical memory in the ways it studies one of the earliest iterations of the version of white nationalism currently insinuating itself into American politics — and its haunting understanding of the insidious creep of such beliefs. Grade: B

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.