Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult star in director Justin Kurzel’s true story thriller The Order – streaming now on Prime Video. It’s enjoyable both as a superior cat-and-mouse thriller and to better understand the ideologies of hate, writes Steve Newall.
What is it about white supremacists that makes them think that acts of mean-spirited terrorism will cause everyday people to rise up in revolutionary race war with them? They’re delusional (to go alongside homicidal, bigoted and idiotic). Or so we’d hope…
The Order tells the story of just one of a number of far-right American hate groups that have been inspired by The Turner Diaries, a racist and anti-Semitic novel that outlines the steps for white nationalists to overthrow the government. Framed as dystopian fiction starring a heroic future revolutionary, neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce’s novel has “inspired more than 200 murders since its publication in 1978,” according to The International Centre for Counter- Terrorism, “including the single deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, the Oklahoma City bombing”.
Among these real-life murders were those committed and ordered by Bob Mathews in the US Pacific Northwest during the early 1980s, carried out in the name of his splinter terrorist organisation called… The Order (uncoincidentally also the name of the secret guerilla organisation waging war in Pierce’s novel). Played fantastically by Nicholas Hoult in Justin Kurzel’s film of the same name, Mathews was a charismatic right-winger who attracted followers to more and more extreme viewpoints than your garden-variety rural white supremacy. Mathews promised action, and as The Order opens, he is delivering it—through the execution of an informer and the first in a series of robberies intended to finance his racist revolution.
“Bob was a very intense young man, and quite different from the weaklings I see so many of in America today”, The Turner Diaries author is reported as telling his biographer. “Bob was obviously very much taken with The Turner Diaries, and it was clear he drew a lot of the elements from the book in the way he did things and the terminology he used and so on”.
Hoult is great casting for “intense young man” and in The Order we see how he can win and retain the confidence of disaffected men attracted to his cause—as well as the women he beds (to propagate his bloodline of course, that’s all, mmm hmm, sure). Strongly cast opposite Hoult is Jude Law as FBI agent Terry Husk. No longer young—in fact, still not having really recovered from open heart surgery and cardiovascular disease—Law plays Husk as the sort of law enforcement agent addicted to being in the field and on the hunt for a suspect. He’s got no time for fucking around, let alone time to allow these armed maniacs to escalate their pattern of terror.
Escalation is very much the playbook for Bob Mathews, and The Turner Diaries sketches out a path for him: secure financial resources for a future campaign of increasing terrorist activity before assassinating public officials, journalists and prominent Jews, poisoning municipal water supplies, bombing public utilities and more… As we learn in The Order, their plan will culminate in mass public executions—the “Day of the Rope”—hanging alleged “race traitors” including “the politicians, the lawyers, the businessmen, the TV newscasters, the newspaper reporters and editors, the judges, the teachers, the school officials, the ‘civic leaders,’ the bureaucrats, the preachers”.
If you’re familiar with the nooses erected outside the US Capitol during the terrorist assault of Jan 6th, then you’ll see the lineage of this manifesto sadly lives on. The book “really becomes a clear point of reference if you look at the photographs of the action,” historian and white power expert Kathleen Belew noted on social media. And “even the action of January 6 unfolded with the same timing and on the same set as the attack in the novel,” she told the US House January 6th Committee.
The story of The Order, then—of Bob Mathews and his followers—is also the story of the first time The Turner Diaries was put to use as a blueprint, although sadly it would not be the last. The film shows how people can be radicalised, and how beliefs and propaganda can echo through the decades. And it lets us sit alongside the individuals affected/infected.
Understanding extreme real-life subjects has become somewhat stock in trade for Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel, whose previous filmography is bookended by two such examples in Snowtown (about the Snowtown “bodies in barrels” murders) and Nitram (the events leading up to the Port Arthur massacre). Kurzel is adept at relocating the action to ’80s Idaho, with a patina and pacing that can recall a bygone Australia as much as it does the work of director Jeremy Saulnier (of Green Room, Rebel Ridge etc, who gets an exec producer credit here).
Cars, clothes and homes all feel authentic while the landscapes are vast and relatively empty. It really does seem like a place you could convince gullible people was “the promised land”—though Kurzel captures its beauty in a way that elevates it over individual men or ideologies, as it should be. It’s as beautiful as Mathews’ soul, The Turner Diaries and agent Terry Husk’s recurring nosebleeds all offer varying forms of ugliness.
There’s plenty to enjoy about The Order solely as a superior cat-and-mouse thriller that’s dominated by a couple of powerful performances (with strong supporting turns from Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett and Alison Oliver). But thinking about how these events of forty years ago have continued to ripple through the US—and into the White House in 2025—lends The Order a chilling quality that asks us to consider whether the hopes of Mathews, his real-life Order and The Turner Diaries themselves, may have actually come to pass.
