GENRE | Jude Law Chases Down 'The Order' x TIFF 2024

"You preach racial economics. We live it."

Toronto International Film Festival

Australian director Justin Kurzel directs a weary Jude Law as a loner FBI agent hunting the eponymous white supremacist domestic terrorist group active in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. Based on the 1989 non-fiction book, The Silent Brotherhood, by Denver journalists Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, The Order dramatizes the atrocities committed by a real-life splinter group of organized racist separatists committed to the violent insurrection of the United States.

A doe-eyed Nicholas Hoult co-stars as the charismatic but ruthless breakaway neo-Nazi leader, Bob Matthews, with both Tye Sheridan and Jurnee Smollett hot on his trail as Law's local cop and FBI sidekicks. As their characters investigate a series of armed robberies, murders, and other crimes, it becomes shockingly clear how dedicated these white insurgent extremists are to their cause of starting a race war with a detailed doctrine (still used today) of key steps in "taking back" their nation.

Full of car chases, shootouts, heists, and a central cat-and-mouse manhunt (one of the largest in FBI history) culminating in a violent siege, screenwriter Zach Baylin's procedural script uses all the standard crime genre conventions to tell its thrilling tale of wounded men seeking out their own form of justice on opposite ends of the law and moral authority.

It's a chilling true-crime docudrama that infiltrates the process and organization of violent white militants radicalized for their cause of overthrowing the federal government in the name of their twisted supremacist ideology. The Order reflects our present political climate of domestic terror by exploring the past's many ills.

The Order screened at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival as part of the Special Presentations program and is available through digital and video on demand.


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