Lidokino 5: Justin Kurzel’s action thriller “The Order” is about Nazi terror in the USA. It is based on a true story.
It all starts with a radio broadcast. Not as a cause, but that’s how the film’s story begins. The presenter Alan Berg, who works for a station in Denver, speaks to a caller who is venting his anti-Semitic prejudices. Berg uses pointed humor to take apart the caller’s conspiracy fantasies, according to which Jews kill children and drink their blood in rituals, and makes it clear to his unknown counterpart on the phone that he doesn’t know what Jews are at all.
Berg’s analytical commentary on his beliefs is that people driven by hatred, such as anti-Semites, do not cope very well in the world, and their only response to this is to deny other people the right to enjoy life.
Justin Kurzel’s thriller “The Order”, which was shown in competition at Venice, tells the story of a true case in the USA in the 1980s. The first images alternate between Berg speaking into the microphone and a car with several men driving into a deserted forest area at night. There is talk of a Bob who wants to meet one of the men. The conversation never takes place, and the man is shot by the other two instead.
“The Order” is based on the non-fiction book “The Silent Brotherhood” about the Nazi terrorist organization The Order, which was founded in 1983 by Robert Jay Mathews in Washington State. The group robbed sex shops, banks and armored cars, counterfeited dollar bills and carried out bomb attacks on porn cinemas. The film also shows an attempted attack on a synagogue, where the bomb simply failed to explode. The Order also committed several murders. Alan Berg was one of their victims.
Perspective of an FBI man
Justin Kurzel tells the story primarily from the perspective of an FBI agent. This Terry Husk is played with controlled grit by Jude Law, as a slightly broken person who has experience with organized crime. He takes up residence in a small town in the neighboring state of Idaho and systematically begins his investigations.
Kurzel also looks at the perspective of the Nazis, but primarily shows how they plan their crimes and then carry them out. Their ideology is represented by the book “The Turner Diaries”, a novel by William Pierce that was widely read internationally among Nazis. It presents a six-step program for a “white” revolution. Mathews, played with fanatical coldness by Nicholas Hoult, also followed this example with The Order.
The ideas that one can get to know are hardly new. Even back then, the aim was to “take back” the country for oneself and one’s white children. It is frightening that such ideas now form the ideological background of a large proportion of Donald Trump’s supporters in the USA. As is well known, they have already attempted a coup.
Kurzel’s film can be criticized for relying too much on action, which admittedly makes for a gripping thriller. But perhaps the plot doesn’t really need to provide more information. The message is primarily: Look at what people with a misguided worldview and plenty of weapons are capable of. There are still too many of them. Not just in the USA.
