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.Under the Banner of Heaven Season 1 Download.
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.
The real-life murders of Brenda and Erica are no mystery, and thus the show is not a whodunnit like HBO’s similarly bleak Mare of Easttown. Krakauer’s book investigated how gruesome violence could be committed in the name of faith, and how the LDS church obscured its ties to the fundamentalist groups that splintered following the church’s official ban on polygamy in 1890. (Krakauer had no official role on the TV series.) Black, who was raised Mormon, casts a similarly harsh and probing light on the LDS church, both in the specifics to this case (an unwillingness to help Pyre’s investigation – the Laffertys, we’re told, were “Utah Kennedys”) and the conservative faith’s general subjugation of women.