The Under the Banner of Heaven series unravels a murder at the heart of the Mormon Church ★★★★☆

For the second time in a short time, we are in the radical realms of the Mormon Church, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The four-part Netflix documentary Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey described the horrific and furious events that took place in a split from the Church led by “Prophet” Warren Jeffs. Jeffs turned his corner of the church into an abuse machine, especially for underage girls, all because God as a prophet dictated to him the course the church should take: religion as a cover.

The excellent drama series Under the Banner of Heavenbased on the 2003 book of the same name by American journalist Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild) begins with the shocking murder of Brenda Lafferty and her young daughter Erica in 1984. Brenda was married to Allen Lafferty, the youngest of the Lafferty brothers, who like to think of themselves as the “Kennedys of the Mormon Church.” The carnage at the heart of the community is shocking enough, especially when it turns out that the perpetrators can sometimes come from their own circle. Krakauer links the radicalization of the Laffertys with the bloody history of the foundation of the faith in the nineteenth century. The screenwriter of the series is Dustin Lance Black, who himself grew up in a Mormon family and, as a young gay man, knew all about the suffocating atmosphere within these religious families, where reproduction and obedience to the patriarch were the only way.

The seven-part series focuses on the police investigation into the murder case. Andrew Garfield (The Social Network, Spider Man) plays Mormon detective Jeb Pyre. When he arrives at the crime scene, we can see from the horror in his eyes that this is by no means an ordinary crime in his circles. Just like in The Staircase (also a drama series based on a true history) the prehistory is given all the space in flashbacks and thus the victim is given a face. The truth that slowly reveals itself shakes the detective’s faith, for what are the sacred writings worth, if there are people who use them to do horrific things to others?

Brenda Lafferty is a strong role of British Daisy Edgar-Jones, who since her starring role in the series Normal People is pursuing a comet-like career. Here she plays a young Mormon woman from the liberal branch of the faith, in which her own career is not considered a sin. But she finds out at the first family gatherings that she is considered a rebel, especially by the patriarch Ammon Lafferty, a chilling role by Christopher Heyerdahl.

Strong point of Under the Banner of Heaven is that the radicalization of the Lafferty brothers has all kinds of motives. It is partly a reaction to their dire economic situation, which they blame the worldly US government for. The justification for not paying taxes and traffic fines is found in the writings of the nineteenth-century founder of the church. It is clear that the brothers were also quite traumatized by their father’s violent reign of terror, and that the trauma sought a way out, which would victimize outsiders.

Black stays a little too close to Krakauer’s book, with an extra layer of flashback that takes us back to the nineteenth century, to show that the radicalization of the Mormon church was actually their basic attitude towards society. It sometimes takes the focus away from the central drama.