'The Order' review: A searing thriller about U.S. terrorists arming for a race war

More than 22 years after he co-starred with Nicholas Hoult in “About a Boy,” Hugh Grant posted a photo last month of the actors reuniting for a tribute to filmmaker Richard Curtis in Hollywood. It was a reminder that while Hoult is still just 34, he has compiled a remarkable and varied résumé, and his range and depth are on full display this year in three wildly different roles: the morally conflicted titular character in “Juror #2,” the ambitious young real estate agent who journeys deep into the Carpathian Mountains to see the mysterious Count Orlok in the upcoming “Nosferatu,” and the real-life neo-Nazi terrorist Bob Mathews in director Justin Kurzel’s intense and searing crime thriller “The Order,” which is set in 1983-1984 but has obvious and sobering parallels to our world today.

Based on the book “The Silent Brotherhood” by Gary Gerhardt and Kevin Flynn, with a richly dramatic screenplay by Zach Baylin and impressive period-piece visuals from cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, “The Order” works as a piece of historically accurate fiction and as a fascinating character study.

Jude Law looks bulky and bleary-eyed and gives a grounded and subtly powerful performance as Terry Husk, a world-weary (and fictional) FBI agent who has tangled with the KKK and the Cosa Nostra and now finds himself in a remote and outwardly sleepy outpost in the Pacific Northwest. For years, the FBI has been investigating a shadowy and nefarious group that calls itself The Order, which follows the teachings of a 1978 novel called “The Turner Diaries” that espouses a race war and the systematic extermination of non-white people, and the trail has led here.

While Husk enlists the help of an idealistic young local police officer named Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), we follow the parallel story of Bob Mathews (Hoult), an insidiously charismatic sociopath who masterminds a series of bank heists to fund The Order’s so-called revolution. In one of the film’s most unnervingly effective sequences, Mathews meets with the white nationalist Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), who cautions Mathews against violence and says the true path to change is by having their people in elected office. By comparison, the vile and reprehensible Butler is a voice of relative reason in this exchange. Talk about chilling.

Director Kurzel deftly handles a number of subplots and introduces a myriad of well-drawn characters along the route. Marc Maron turns in sharply honed work as the real-life talk show host Alan Berg, who was assassinated by members of The Order. Jurnee Smollett’s FBI Agent Joanne Carney provides balance to Law’s borderline rogue actions. Alison Oliver and Odessa Young both do layered work as Mathews’ wife and his mistress, respectively. We feel a measure of empathy for each of them because of the way Mathews treats them, but only to a degree; they know who this man is and what he's about.

“The Order” is an enormously effective thriller, and yes, a timely reminder that there has never been a time in this land when darkness and hate didn’t thrive, and in numbers.