In ‘The Order,’ a chilling Seattle-area crime story hits movie screens

On Dec. 9, 1984, The Seattle Times reported on Page 1 that a man named Robert Mathews, identified as a “neo-Nazi extremist,” was believed to have died in a fire as FBI agents stormed the Whidbey Island house in which he had holed up. The charismatic self-proclaimed founder of an organization known as the White American Bastion, The Silent Brotherhood — or simply The Order — Mathews and his followers committed multiple crimes in the Pacific Northwest to fund their plan to overthrow the government, including a robbery of $500,000 from an armored truck at Seattle’s Northgate Mall in April 1984.

It’s a story that some locals may remember, but it was entirely new to Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel (“Macbeth,” “Assassin’s Creed”). “I didn’t even know it was true,” Kurzel said in an interview earlier this month, about his first read of a script by screenwriter Zach Baylin. He was immediately fascinated, both by the idea of the potential film — “It felt like a really old-school sort of film, the kind I really loved and admired from the past, like a Sidney Lumet or William Friedkin film” — and by the resonance of the subject matter. “There were just things in it that I thought, this could be today.”

“The Order,” Kurzel’s film inspired by the facts of Mathews’ life and death, arrives in theaters Dec. 6, with Nicholas Hoult playing Mathews and Jude Law as the FBI agent in pursuit of him. And while it’s very much a Pacific Northwest story — Mathews spent the last decade of his life in this region — it was, like many Pacific Northwest-based stories, not actually filmed here. Kurzel and his crew shot the entire movie in and around Calgary in Alberta, and the surrounding Rocky Mountains.

Mathews (1953-84), who grew up in Phoenix, moved to Metaline Falls in Pend Oreille County in 1974. In 1980, he joined the neo-Nazi group the National Alliance, and three years later formed his own splinter group. Never more than perhaps two dozen members, The Order nonetheless launched a one-year series of violent crimes ranging from robbery to bombings to murder. According to the Sept. 17, 1985, issue of The Seattle Times, the stolen money was intended to make The Order “the philanthropists of right-wing extremist groups,” sharing cash with the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups.

Baylin’s screenplay used as its basis the 1989 nonfiction book “The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground,” by investigative journalists Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt. The film does take some liberties with the true story, as feature films often do for reason of dramatic efficacy. For example, Law’s character Terry Husk, a burned-out FBI agent sent to the Northwest after 25 years with the bureau, is not based on a real-life person, though there were a number of FBI agents who investigated and pursued Mathews over the years. “There were so many people working on the case — you try to find one point of view,” said Kurzel. Other FBI characters created for the film include deputy Jamie Bowen, played by Tye Sheridan, and special agent Joanne Carney, played by Jurnee Smollett.

For casting Mathews, Kurzel wanted to find someone particularly vivid. The real Bob Mathews, he said, was “so engaging to a lot of people — he was a handsome, charismatic, very alluring person. When you saw photos of him, you could see and understand that.” Hoult, who had worked with Kurzel before in “True History of the Kelly Gang,” bore a resemblance to Mathews and had that magnetism. “You had to look at him straightaway and understand why people would gravitate toward this person,” Kurzel said.

It made sense to shoot in Calgary, Kurzel said, for several reasons. The first was financial: Calgary offered numerous incentives — “opportunities to make the budget go as far as it can because it was a very small budget film” — to the production. And he liked the look of the area. So many places, he says, don’t look like they did in the ’80s, but “there’s something kind of timeless about Calgary … A lot of American films are shooting there, period Americans films — there’s something there that feels untouched.”

The region particularly suits Western-style films — “The Order,” with its villain and lawman facing off, feels like it belongs to that genre — and a number of American Westerns have been filmed in Calgary in the last few decades: “Unforgiven,” “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “The Revenant.” “I’d always been fascinated by the Westerns shot in Calgary,” Kurzel said. “There’s something about those skies, what those clouds do, what those vistas do, that felt really right for this.”

The real-life story of Mathews faded away long ago. Multiple members of The Order went on trial and were convicted of racketeering and conspiracy charges; according to The Seattle Times on Dec. 31, 1985, all received minimum 40-year sentences. But white supremacist groups continue to proliferate throughout the country, many inspired by the same sources that held Mathews in thrall. The film notes that “The Turner Diaries,” a 1978 novel by white supremacist William Luther Pierce that describes a violent overthrow of the U.S. government, continues to be embraced by extremists, citing it as an influence on some who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Kurzel hopes the film will serve as a reminder of how “the same sort of issues are still bubbling away,” he said, with materials like “The Turner Diaries” still “living in the shadows.” It’s a warning, he said, about how communities that are disenfranchised become much more likely to fall sway to dangerous figures, who may be offering answers that are far more evil than they initially appear. This film reminds its viewers there are others like Robert Mathews among us, waiting quietly in the darkness.