Under the Banner of Heaven review — Mormon murder drama probes questions of faith

Under the Banner of Heaven, a new detective drama set in 1980s Utah, is a story driven by two interrogations. The first is of the procedural kind and involves starchy local officer Jeb Pyre (Emmy-nominated Andrew Garfield), grilling the main suspects in the gruesome killing of a young woman and her infant daughter. The second is an internal, existential one as the Mormon detective begins to quietly pick at his beliefs when confronted with the reality that there are Latter-day Saints who use their religion as justification for the most devilish acts.

Based on Jon Krakauer’s true-crime bestseller, the seven-part series — arriving on Disney Plus in the UK — is a weighty, tenebrous affair. Light only on action, it broadly eschews mystery and suspense in favour of an engrossing examination of what happens when an unthinking conviction in what is pure and right is suddenly disrupted.

The victim, Brenda Lafferty (Daisy Edgar-Jones), was the source of that disturbance in the family she married into. For the Laffertys — an influential Latter-day Saint (LDS) clan, referred to as Utah’s very own Kennedys — Brenda’s Mormonism is deemed a little too lax and modern, her personality too meddling. While husband Alan (Billy Howle) admires her boisterous confidence, his father (a wiry, menacing patriarch played by Christopher Heyerdahl) and brothers keep a scrutinising eye on her. “Mind your property,” the newly-wed is warned.

These tense, terrifically acted family scenes play out in flashbacks that punctuate Jeb’s questioning of Alan, who is initially assumed to be the culprit. Now an apostate, he maintains his wife was killed in the name of LDS fundamentalism, which his brothers, led by the volatile Dan (Wyatt Russell), had come to embrace. “Our faith breeds dangerous men,” he tells Jeb, who we see gradually, reluctantly disabused of the notion that his is a religion defined by love and unity. “I don’t want to hear it,” he snaps back at one point, but Garfield’s brilliantly expressive face — always bearing a trace of anxiety and discomfort — reveals that he’s incapable of silencing the doubts within him.

While Jeb is presented as a man of virtue and integrity, the show has unavoidably provoked members of the Mormon community, who claim that they have been vilified and sensationalised here. But for all the specificities of this story — and there are momentum-draining dramatisations of the early days of the LDS church for context — its aim doesn’t seem to be to pour scorn on mainstream Mormonism. Instead, its wider target is the kind of extreme dogmatism and chauvinism that can thrive within any person or group who leaves no room for questions.

★★★★☆

Available to stream on Disney Plus from 27 July. Streaming on Hulu in the US