The Order

It really is Nicholas Hoult’s time to shine. Having turned in stellar recent performances in Juror #2 and Nosferatu, he’s quietly terrifying as real-life 1980s white supremacist Bob Mathews in The Order, eerily sporting the same bowl haircut as he did aged 11 in About A Boy. Reuniting with his True History Of The Kelly Gang director Justin Kurzel, Hoult is totally convincing as the young neo-Nazi leader who is dangerously charismatic to his acolytes, fixing allies and enemies alike with his piercing gaze.

Mathews is up against Jude Law’s hard-bitten and gloriously moustachioed FBI agent Terry Husk. He’s certainly a hard-drinking husk of a man, convincing himself that his estranged wife and daughter will come back to him and that eliminating Mathews will silence his demons. Law and Hoult are brilliantly matched as the self-destructive adversaries who will each stop at nothing to achieve their ends, with Law supported by strong performances from Tye Sheridan and Jurnee Smollett as fellow cops.

The propulsive script is genuinely gripping.

Brutal violence in bleakly beautiful landscapes is Kurzel’s bread and butter, from the desolate Scottish battlefields of Macbeth to the rocky Tasmanian coast in Nitram. In The Order, Husk and Mathews’ game of cat-and-mouse plays out among the mountains and lakes of the Pacific Northwest, as well as police-station offices and remote farm buildings, as if the fight for America’s soul is playing out on the very edge of society.

There’s nothing hugely radical about this film, but the propulsive script by King Richard’s Zach Baylin is genuinely gripping, matched by Kurzel’s deftly crafted action sequences. Its subject matter feels, of course, remarkably prescient, but The Order avoids the temptation to lecture its audience. Instead, Kurzel presents chilling images such as the deeply racist and anti-Semitic novel The Turner Diaries being read to children as a bedtime story, and allows space for the horror of it all to sink in.