I really wanted to catch Justin Kurzel’s new film, The Order, at TIFF and it just did not fit into my schedule. But it’s coming in December, so just in time for the holidays, let’s have a film about neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
I love how awards season means some of the most wretchedly depressing films we’ll watch all year are coming out during the six weeks we all want to turn our brains off and consume carbs and chill. Anyway, here’s a trailer for The Order:
Stars Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, and Jurnee Smollett were at a tastemaker screening hosted by CAA. Tastemaker screenings are among that class of trophy trail events hosted by famous peers, in this case, Jason Bateman, intended to drum up interest in projects for awards voters. Will it work for The Order? Probably not. Kurzel’s work is so f-cking depressing. He’s incredibly talented, but his films are such a bummer they never really get mainstream traction, at least outside his native Australia. His first feature film is Snowtown, about the “bodies in barrels” murders that happened in the 1990s around Adelaide. His last feature is Nitram, about the Port Arthur massacre, the largest mass shooting in Australian history. In between he made a bleak adaptation of Macbeth and directed the somehow even bleaker Assassin’s Creed (it’s both confusing and humorless) both starring Michael Fassbender. Justin Kurzel: here to show you just the worst time!
The Order trades Aussie true crime for American, as it follows the conflict between white supremacist Bob Mathews and the FBI, which resulted in one of the largest manhunts in US history. Jude Law stars as an FBI agent, Nicholas Hoult, who previously worked with Kurzel on The True History of the Kelly Gang, as Mathews. Hoult is known now as one of cinema’s best silly boys, but he does have a rarely engaged gear in which he can play truly terrible people. Leave it to Justin Kurzel to be the one to consistently throw Hoult into that gear. As depressing as his work is, I do admire Kurzel’s work a lot—well, maybe not Assassin’s Creed—and I do want to see The Order, even if it will interrupt my regularly scheduled “no thoughts, only cookies” holiday programming.
