On the heels of its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Aug. 31, Aussie filmmaker Justin Kurzel’s The Order arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival this week. And, as was the case on the other side of the ocean, the film — which King Richard Oscar nominee Zach Baylin adapted from Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt‘s 1989 book The Silent Brotherhood, about the FBI’s pursuit of a domestic terror group in the 1980s — was largely embraced by critics and audiences. As for awards season prospects, it has one, in particular: lead actor Jude Law.
The British actor is no longer the pretty-boy you may remember from his Oscar-nominated turns decades ago in the late Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and Cold Mountain (2003). Now 51, he has experienced plenty of personal and professional ups and downs; looks like he has; and, it turns out, has come through it all a better actor. We got a hint of this a year ago when he came to Cannes with Firebrand, in which he played an unforgettable Henry VIII. And now TIFF audiences are seeing it in two films at the fest, Ron Howard’s Eden, which is still seeking U.S. distribution, and The Order, which Vertical will put into limited release on Dec. 6.
In The Order, Law plays Terry Husk, a grizzled FBI agent haunted by past cases — he reminds me of Gene Hackman in The French Connection, The Conversation and Mississippi Burning — who moves to Idaho seeking a slower pace of life. Once there, though, he gets pulled back into the deep end after catching wind of a series of crimes in the Pacific Northwest that, he realizes, all lead back to an offshoot of the Neo-Nazi white supremacist Aryan Nations. The group, called The Order, is led by a charismatic young racist named Bob Mathews (played very effectively by Nicholas Hoult), with whom Husk embarks on a cat-and-mouse chase that leaves a lot of brutality and blood in its wake.
Though set in 1983, the film feels urgently relevant today. Indeed, the same source material that inspired Mathews and The Order — namely, white nationalist William Luther Pierce’s 1978 book The Turner Diaries — helped to radicalize Americans who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995; who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; and who are plotting other acts of terror at this very moment.
The film is obviously very dark and troubling, at a time when the real world is too, which may make it a tough sell at the box office. But if awards voters can be mobilized to check it out (perhaps Vertical should sell it as a feature-length version of True Detective, which it sort of is), I think they will come away very impressed with Law.
