Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The swastika flies under American skies in The Order: a nightmare image from a true story. The film unfolds in a slim but deadly stretch of time between 1983 and 1984. It often plays like a muted crime thriller. Really, it is a story of charisma and belief. Nicholas Hoult stars as Robert Jay Mathews, the Washington state white supremacist who was piecing together an underground army when the film is set. In our modern age of antic political performers, Mathews is something colder: a clean-living guy with big ideas.Early on, we hear a blithe assurance that fanatics of his kind are too inept to realise their plans. The rest of the film goes about disproving that. Across the blue-grey Pacific Northwest, a string of successful armed robberies raise funds for the coming race war. Murder happens between.The film is directed by Justin Kurzel, the Australian filmmaker whose movies tend to the abyssal. His debut, Snowtown, based on another real criminal case, still upsets me just to think about. (Cinema release schedules aren’t down to directors, but The Order coming out in the UK as a Christmas movie is a touch of sardonic genius.) And yet here, as in Kurzel’s other work, you rarely see actual violence. The horror is what lurks inside the characters, the stifling air of rooms where something is rotten.The film is tied to real events, but Kurzel allows himself a fictional device: a weary FBI agent played by Jude Law. Honestly, the casting is off. The character is a broken man, but Law reads as preening even here. Still, he can’t be blamed for not being Gene Hackman, whose 50-year-old self should be starring instead amid the grit and crunch of the pursuit. Hoult is closer to the real icy spirit of the movie. Kurzel’s filmmaking has a flat affect: he takes it you don’t need him to denounce neo-Nazism out loud. Instead, the movie speaks most clearly with a recurring image: an aerial shot of American land, the soil to which will be added the blood.★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from Boxing Day and in US cinemas now
