Adam Arkapaw shot the first season of True Detective, and The Order captures that vibe so completely it feels like it was made bespoke for me. I love the color and the tone. Kurzel and Arkapaw give the landscape (Alberta, standing in for the Inland Northwest) a desolation that makes all of it more horrible. Why, in a place so miraculous, are all these people so angry at the world?
Watching the detectives dig Walter West out of the mud put me on sensory overload. They wipe the dirt from his hand and there’s his wedding ring, then his face. The springiness of the flesh, the viscosity of it, everything about the effect makes me believe I’m looking at a body that’s been in the ground. It is a perfect effect.
Somewhere along the way I forgot Jude Law was in it. Husk is a worn-out fed under a big moustache, and this is the first time I’ve ever thought about growing one myself … just to see.
Nicholas Hoult’s Bob Mathews scares me more than Edward Norton’s Derek Vinyard, who opened this series for us. Derek can shout a whole dinner table into submission. Mathews seems perfectly happy to explain himself politely, and Hoult makes me believe he could get people to sit and listen. He’s organized. He has a family and a plan for how the world ought to work, and I find him awful to spend time with. Having two Brits in these leads has me reeling a bit, mostly with cultural embarrassment. Law and Hoult have plenty to poke at in their own country. Ours just feels so tragically resonant right now.
I like the pairing of Husk and Mathews enough that I get impatient when the movie starts underlining the similarities between the two sides. Jamie’s kid plays with cars in the dirt, and in the next scene Mathews’s kid is doing the same. I don’t need quite this much help keeping up.
Marc Maron is perfect as Alan Berg, and I’m still working out what the movie wants from him. His broadcasts help frame the story, but his murder barely changes the hunt we’re following. The real investigation got a crucial lead from a pistol Mathews dropped at the Ukiah armored-car robbery; finding Berg’s murder weapon later was another major break in the case. I can understand why the film doesn’t turn his death into the event that sets everything in motion. It just leaves me wanting more connection between the man we’ve been listening to and the investigation taking up most of the movie.
Four stars. I had a hell of a time with this, and I wanted the ending to bother me more. Law has said he and Kurzel wanted “this foreboding sense of continuation.” That’s how Mathews feels to me through most of the movie: horribly familiar, right down to the people willing to hear him out. Once the film starts wrapping up the case, though, it gives me more closure than I want. There are still people listening to this shit.