The predominant feeling throughout Under the Banner of Heaven, an 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.
