The new film about an FBI agent chasing a white supremacist terror cell is based on a true story—and one that connects the headlines of 40 years ago to those of today.
Photograph Courtesy of Vertical
In The Order, director Justin Kurzel’s electric new film, Terry Husk, a haggard, possessed FBI veteran played by Jude Law, pores over a thin paperback with a blood-red cover, paging through diagrams of targeted killings, bombings, and a gallows erected in front of the United States Capitol.
“There are six steps in that book,” says a young sheriff deputized as his assistant, played by Tye Sheridan. He gives the Cliff Notes version as he scours the book, his eyes riveted.
“Recruiting,” he says. “Fundraising. Armed revolution. Domestic terror. Assassination.
“Number six is the day of the rope.”
The book is The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel that depicts the violent overthrow of the American government by armed white supremacist insurgents and the extermination of people of color and Jews in a race war. Photocopied pages from it were found in Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s getaway car when he was apprehended by law enforcement.
Along with Husk and Bob Mathews—the founder of a murderous underground white supremacist guerrilla outfit that counterfeited money and robbed banks and armored cars, played by Nicholas Hoult—The Turner Diaries is the third major character in The Order. Though Mathews formally named his group the Silent Brotherhood and claimed he took little inspiration from William Luther Pierce’s incendiary novel, he and his comrades did refer to their group as “The Order”—the same term used in the book for the protagonist’s genocidal militants.
The book’s crimson cover and lurid drawings resurface time and time again. Mathews reads excerpts to his young son before bedtime; a pastor at a neo-Nazi compound in Idaho proffers it to visiting law enforcement agents; and it turns up in the hands of FBI agents desperately seeking to plot out the insurgents’ next moves.
The Order unearths a critical chapter in the history of the American extreme right largely forgotten by the general public. The murder of Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg in 1984 by two of Mathews’ acolytes brought the Order to national attention 40 years ago and inspired not one but two Hollywood films in that decade—Betrayed and Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio. Since then, though, only close observers of prison gang and skinhead culture have had cause to track mentions of the Silent Brotherhood by tweaked-out Aryan Brotherhood killers or the annual “Martyrs Day” pilgrimage of Hammerskins from across the West Coast to Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound, where Mathews met his fiery death during a shootout with the FBI.
Now, as the country ponders a return to the 2016-2020 period, when Mathews’ ideological offspring ran riot from Oregon to Washington, DC, his saga is getting marquee billing.
While the film debuts almost a full decade into the American extreme right’s current revival, screenwriter Zach Baylin and producer Bryan Haas began developing the project back in 2016, before the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Baylin tells WIRED that he and Haas stumbled on The Turner Diaries while researching Ruby Ridge, the 1990s militia movement, and McVeigh (who slept with the book under his pillow) and casting around for a lesser-known story to explore the origins of American extremism.
“We were looking to encase the story of one of these groups inside a classic crime thriller,” Baylin says. They stumbled across The Silent Brotherhood, a 1989 book by reporters Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt that traced the entire arc of Mathews’ crime spree, from his teenage radicalization through the John Birch Society and Phoenix militias all the way through his death and the subsequent criminal trials of his followers.
“The crimes the Order committed and the way the investigation unfolded, it had the framework of the kind of film that we’d been talking about,” he said.
Flynn and Gerhart’s book, which began with their coverage of Berg’s assassination in his driveway and followed the Order’s saga through the federal pursuit, investigation, and prosecution, is remarkably detailed. Once members of the group were up for trial, Flynn and Gerhart spent hours interviewing them in the Arapahoe County jail, gathering priceless material that allowed them to reconstruct the terrorist group’s inner workings in minute detail. Readers of the book, which is back in print (with a new title) after three decades off the shelves, will note the film’s fidelity to life, particularly in the robbery and heist scenes. However, for Flynn and Gerhardt—who died in 2015—the minutiae of Mathews’ terror campaign were a mechanism to engage audiences with a deeper, darker reality.
“We didn’t write the book for the details. We wrote it to expose the banality of evil, so readers could understand where these folks come from and how endemic it is in American society,” says Flynn, who reported for the Rocky Mountain News for nearly three decades before it shuttered in 2009. Since 2015, he has served as a city councilman in Denver.
The Order is the sort of film America does not produce anymore. Its taut action scenes hearken back to Heat, To Live and Die in L.A., The French Connection, and Sidney Lumet’s police corruption canon (Serpico, Prince of the City, Q&A); the droning soundtrack does not overwhelm viewers; and Adam Arkapaw’s washed-out cinematography encapsulates both the grandeur and the intimidating solitude of the interior Pacific Northwest. The dialog is sparing, direct, and—in spite of Mathews’ grandiose promises of a renewed whites-only bastion in the Pacific Northwest—remarkably free of proselytizing.
For a movie shot in such wide-open landscapes, The Order is tinged through with claustrophobia, a testament to the tension rife throughout Baylin’s writing and Kurzel’s meticulous direction. Like Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in Michael Mann’s Heat, Hoult and Law only come face to face with each other a few times before their penultimate confrontation. However, Kurzel had both actors follow each other for a day and compile dossiers on their opposite number to develop a granular sense of how a manhunt actually functions.
“I wanted them to ask themselves, what does that feel like having a relationship with someone you’re trying to take down? You’re living with a phantom, in a way,” Kurzel says.
Law, whose slow-burn performance is unlike any prior role from his four decades on stage and screen, says the similarities between Husk and Mathews as two opposites of the same coin are at the core of The Order’s dramatic tension.
“They’re more alike than they’d ever admit—both are driven, charismatic, and know exactly how to manipulate those around them to achieve their goals,” he says. “Nicholas and I really leaned into that symmetry during our scenes together. It’s almost like they’re looking into a dark mirror—each recognizing qualities in the other that they either admire or fear. That underlying connection adds layers to their conflict, making it not just a clash of ideologies but also a deeply personal battle. It was fascinating to explore that tension with Nicholas.”
Mathews’ brief campaign of armed insurgency and domestic terrorism has continued to inspire generations of extremists in the United States and beyond, from McVeigh and the neo-Nazi bankrollers of the Aryan Republican Army to the killers of Germany’s National Socialist Underground, all the way through to contemporary groups like Atomwaffen Division, the Base and the Terrorgram Collective. The latter group, which federal law enforcement believes to be a “bold-letter, category one” domestic terrorism threat, circulates voluminous propaganda booklets that meld the ethos of The Turner Diaries with Ted Kaczynski’s anti-industrial-civilization ethos and neo-Nazi occultism.
Terrorgram’s materials, which include viable bomb-making instructions, camouflage and tactical guides, and instructions on how to disable critical infrastructure like electrical substations, water treatment plants and dams, have radicalized at least one so-called “saint,” or mass shooter, and are alleged to have been connected to a series of power grid attacks in North Carolina as well as several active federal prosecutions.
“William Pierce doesn’t build bombs,” Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Rolling Stone a quarter of a century ago. “He builds bombers.” In many ways, the Terrorgram Collective fulfills the same role now, and its publications have become the modern-day version of the Turner Diaries. Disseminated worldwide through the moderation-free wilderness of Telegram, the group’s message of hate and violence is now circulating independently of any organized group or ideology for disaffected, unbalanced “lone wolves” to latch onto as justification for future atrocities.
While The Order remains firmly rooted in the past save for one passing reference to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in a title card, during production there was no escaping the drumbeat of resurgent far-right militancy in the United States. Kurzel, the director, recalls watching news coverage of the January 6 insurrection and remarking on the gallows erected outside the Capitol building—a drawing of which features in the book and the exposition scene with law. “The Turner Diaries started to become more visible in a present-day setting in a way I was kind of shocked by,” he says, speaking to WIRED from his Tasmania residence. Indeed, following January 6, Amazon removed The Turner Diaries from its online inventory.
Hoult’s bravura portrayal of an ice-cool, controlled yet menacing Mathews through the Order’s campaign of armed robbery, counterfeiting, murder, and armed confrontation with the FBI is one of the film’s dual anchors. Aside from a striking physical resemblance to the Silent Brotherhood’s founder, Hoult closely studied his subject, aping Mathews’ mannerisms and movements from old documentary footage, studying texts that radicalized his subject, lifting weights, and cutting alcohol from his diet.
“Mathews was someone who thought and planned so in advance of what his ultimate goal was, I think he always kept in sight. That’s something Justin and I spoke about, that he wouldn’t lose his head on trivial things or things that would potentially harm his cause. In his mind, he’d already, in some ways, planned his destiny,” Hoult tells WIRED.
By choosing to play Mathews with reserve instead of bombast, as more of a watcher who carefully observes his surroundings and other people to better understand how to turn situations to his advantage, Hoult aimed to show audiences how someone with the charisma of his villain could attract followers and build a movement.
“I think that shows how they penetrate communities and societies in a different way, and perhaps people in the future might be less susceptible to people who behave like him,” he says.
As with any artistic project that focuses on extremism and mass violence, The Order’s production team walked a fine line between showing Mathews’ magnetism and the murderous project at the heart of his ideology and actions.
“I think you need to understand the pull of a figure like this,” says Kurzel, whose prior films Snowtown and Nitram depicted, respectively, youthful serial killers and Australia’s worst mass shooting, the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. “Mathews is definitely someone who understands their reach and how to communicate and gather people. There’s gonna be a certain kind of charisma about that.”
Haas, one of the film’s producers, echoed Kurzel's remarks about art pushing the boundaries of acceptability. “It felt like part of the movie was to show the appeal of Bob. He was someone who had charisma, and that tied to these really toxic ideas is really dangerous,” Haas says, praising the “unrelenting realism” the cast brought to their performances.
Ultimately, the hope of slipping an unsparing portrayal of domestic extremism—produced outside of the Hollywood studio system—into the December award season is to reintroduce a discussion of radicalization to American society. “If you don’t learn from history, you’re doomed to repeat it—how a guy that, in the way Nick depicted him, could live down anybody’s street,” says Haas. “There are lots of people right now who are hurting and struggling and looking for answers.”
Updated: 12/6/2024 4:01 pm EST: This story was updated to clarify which character reads out six steps given in The Turner Diaries.
