Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones shine in a mixed adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s 2003 book on a double murder by Mormon fundamentalists
The predominant feeling throughout Under the Banner of Heaven, and ambitious and uneven adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s 2003 nonfiction book, is dread. From the moment in the first scene when a phone call takes detective Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield) away from his two young daughters, there’s a sense that Something Bad is coming, that each step forward will sink deeper into darkness. There’s that first horrific step down in the second scene, as Pyre recoils at a vicious crime scene. Director David Mackenzie’s camera spares you the bodies but not the blood – smeared on the phone, handprinted on the door, puddled on the kitchen floor.
The seven-part limited series, created by Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk), follows the investigation into who slashed the throats of 24-year-old Brenda Lafferty (Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her 15-month-old daughter in July 1984. But it also offers a steady stream of evermore disturbing revelations: the perversion of religious fundamentalism, the silence of religious institutions who choose pride over truth and, less effectively, the history of violence within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, more commonly known as Mormonism.
