Justin Kurzel, the uncompromising talent behind the moral murk of Snowtown and Nitram, has a compelling gift for examining the bleakest aspects of criminality. This tense police procedural, anchored by an unrecognisably dishevelled Jude Law, was adapted by the screenwriter Zach Baylin (King Richard, Creed III) from the 1989 nonfiction book The Silent Brotherhood.
In the early 1980s, the Order, a white-supremacist terrorist group, robbed banks and stole $3.6 million from a security truck in California to fund a race war against the United States government. Their leader, Robert Jay Mathews, would die in a shoot-out with federal agents in a safe house in Washington State.
Law plays the aptly named Terry Husk, a crumpled, historical-composite FBI investigator dispatched to the Pacific Northwest on the Order’s trail. A hard-drinking pill-popper, estranged from his family, he makes the locals uneasy, save for a committed young deputy played by Tye Sheridan.
People of interest are swiftly identified. Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult, never better) is the magnetic leader of the murderous gang of bank robbers, bomb-builders and counterfeiters committed to a vision of an all-white United States, named after the white-power separatists in the notorious political manifesto The Turner Diaries.
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Polygamy is part of Mathews’s plan to propagate the US with neo-Nazis. His heated exchange with the sinister, preacher-like Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), the founder of the Aryan Nations, marks Mathews as an extremist even within white-nationalist circles.
There are echoes of the cat-and-mouse games between De Niro and Pacino in Michael Mann’s Heat in Husk’s dogged pursuit of his suspect.
Adam Arkapaw’s dynamic cinematography, the pulsing electronica of the director’s regular composer (and brother) Jed Kurzel, and a snarling script make for a taut and gritty thriller that could pass for a moody, rediscovered early-1970s classic originally shot sometime between The French Connection and Death Wish.
In cinemas from Thursday, December 26th
