'A very scary conversation about today': Director of Alberta-shot crime thriller says The Order resonates with the here and now

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Justin Kurzel was only a few pages into reading Kevin Flyn and Gary Gerdhardt’s book The Silent Brotherhood when he sensed the cinematic potential of the story.
Set in the 1980s in the Pacific Northwest, the book begins with some high-octane action sequences.
“There are two heists within the first 15 pages,” says Kurzel in a Zoom interview with Postmedia. “They were fantastically written. It reminded me of those incredible Sydney Lumet, William Friedkin, French Connection-type films of the ’70s.”
More than one reviewer of Kurzel’s Alberta-shot film The Order, which is loosely based on The Silent Brotherhood, has noticed that it bears a resemblance to those taut crime films of the past. But the more Kurzel read, the more enamoured he became. It had all the hallmarks of a crime thriller but was also based on a horrifyingly true story. The full title of the original book is The Silent Brotherhood: The Chilling Inside Story of America’s Violent, Anti-Government Militia Movement. It traces the origins of The Order, a domestic terrorism group founded in the early 1980s which based its ugly ideology on the white-supremacist novel The Turner Diaries.
Kurzel, an Australian director whose previous work includes the gritty 2011 crime drama Snowtown to 2016’s video-game adaptation Assassin’s Creed, liked the action, setting and premise. But he soon realized there was much more to the film than stylish genre hallmarks. The story seemed to be saying something about modern America.
“It went from ‘Wow, this is a great ride. I’ve been looking for an American film and this feels like it is right in my lane’ to having a very scary conversation about today and the legacy of this particular group,” Kurzel says.
The Order received rave reviews and a lengthy standing ovation when it debuted at the Venice Film Festival this summer. It was snuck into a few American theatres as part of a limited release at the end of 2024, presumably so it could meet the deadline for Oscar nominations. But it won’t be available in Canada until Feb. 6 when it begins streaming on Amazon Prime Video. It seems like a curiously soft release for a film of this stature. For one, it features some serious star power. Two-time Oscar nominee Jude Law plays a fictionalized FBI agent in pursuit of the group while Emmy-winning X-Men, Mad Max: Fury Road and Nosferatu star Nicholas Hoult plays Bob Mathews, the real-life leader of the Order. Secondly, while it may be a period piece from the 1980s, it seems frighteningly relevant today given the divisive political climate in the U.S.
“As we wrote the script, shot it and edited it and now with the release, the world around us has been shifting and changing and creating a very different conversation, it seems monthly, about this film,” Kurzel says. “It’s interesting, when you get scripts that are set in a particular period, it sort of feels like ‘Well, that happened back then.’ But when you get those films where what happened back then feels like what is happening now and that, somehow, are feeding into a fear or zeitgeist today, you know you’ve got something strong. It always seemed to me to be a film about a particular set of events in a particular period. But I’ve definitely had more conversations about this film and its relationship to now than I probably thought I would have.”

Production began in May 2023 with Calgary, Didsbury, Drumheller, Dorothy, Hesketh and Wayne filling in for 1980s-era Spokane, Denver, Seattle and small-town Idaho. Law plays Terry Husk, an amalgamation of real-life law-enforcement officers involved in the investigation, but is also a take on the 1970s-1980s archetype of weary crime fighters. Law’s Husk is a dedicated but flawed protagonist who has been worn out battling organized crime in New York. Estranged from his family, he retreats to the one-man FBI office in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where he begins to investigate a disappearance and several heists. Hoult offers an equally compelling performance as Mathews, whose violent nature hides behind a somewhat bland, regular-guy stance. He oversees a splinter group that breaks away from the white nationalist/Christian identity organization in the area because he feels the movement needs to take more direct action. He and a group of young American men rob banks to bankroll what they think will become the violent overthrow of the government. They also bomb porn theatres and synagogues and murder Jewish radio host Alan Berg (played by Marc Maron.) All of this is based on fact.
“There’s some really good research material on Bob Mathews, there’s actually lots of clips,” Kurzel says when asked about Hoult’s approach to the role. “It’s a formidable thing. It can be overwhelming to play a figure like Bob Mathews. Who is this guy? Why did he have this pull? Why did he have this reach? What are the aspects of him that can get you to key into something? For us, what was really interesting was how very clean he was: He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink, he mainly ate red meat. Nick and I talked about it and he did that, he lived very, very clean. A lot of the questions I was asking him were like ‘How do you feel?’ He said ‘I feel amazing. I’ve got this clarity and energy in me.’ That, just in a very physical nature, becomes a powerful insight into the character you plan and there’s an energy you bring to the scenes.”
Law, who also served as an executive producer on the film, showed equal dedication. The British actor, who earned Oscar nominations for The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain, maintains a deep curiosity about acting and filmmaking, which “is a joy as a director to be around,” Kurzel says.
“He was nervous,” he says. “He hadn’t played a role like this before and that nervousness and anxiety about that is a wonderful thing to be around. It’s got a tension to it. There was never a day when Jude got complacent. There was always this feeling of ‘I hope I don’t (expletive) this up.'”
Despite the high-profile cast – which also includes Tye Sheridan as a young police officer and Jurnee Smollett as an FBI agent – The Order was shot in just over a month on a relatively shoestring budget. This made the small-town Alberta locations valuable since very little had to be done to make them look like America in the 1980s, Kurzel says.
“It was very important to me that the locations felt real and I didn’t want to build sets,” he says. “There was something quite timeless about Calgary and especially some of the towns just outside of Calgary that spoke really clearly to finding an authenticity to the film. It has an old Americana feel that most of America doesn’t have.”
The crew was equally impressive.
“You’re sitting there talking to horse wranglers or stunt people – we had this amazing props master – and? the films they have worked on is extraordinary,” Kurzel says. “There was this rich, healthy respect for that kind of cinematic history. I have nothing but amazing things to say about them. It was a very hard film to make. To make a heist-genre film in 33 days with a ridiculously small budget compared to what it should have been – to pull off a series of heists like we did – you need an incredible crew who were just on and professional and very, very focused.”
The Order streams on Amazon Prime Video starting Feb. 6.
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