Robert Jay Mathews was the founder of a white supremacist organisation that lends its name to Justin Kurzel’s cop procedural, The Order. In a 1984 letter, Mathews explained his desire to “quit being the hunted and become the hunter.” This notion sits at the heart of the film, a captivating cat and mouse chronicle of the rise of Nazi-inspired ideology in ’80s USA.

A police procedural needs a tormented copper, and Jude Law fills this role as ageing agent Terry Husk. Initially investigating violent robberies, he ends up heading an operation to catch Nicholas Hoult’s Mathews, who plans to kickstart a race war in America. As an entry to this flinty genre, The Order proves a competently realised affair. Kurzel’s longtime collaborator Adam Arkapaw captures the vast American Northwest, with its sinewy roads nestled beside mountains as the only gateways out, with visual elan. Law plays against type as Husk while Hoult embodies the particular charm that allows the cruel to control the gullible.

Tough luck, however, for those expecting another dose of Kurzel’s violent social realism. This is not the Australian outback, and The Order sees the director tamed, manifest in his prioritising of ethical questionings over criminal minutiae. The horror comes from seeing seismic consequences closer to newspaper headlines than history books. Figureheads die, but words live on, with grifters always waiting in the wings, spouting the same hate.