the terrible true story behind the series with Andrew Garfield

The series is coming to Disney+, but it’s not a happy cartoon. By order of God, a dark and breathtaking thriller landed on the streaming platform on Thursday July 28. Andrew Garfield, revealed in both films The Amazing Spider-Man then in the very bloody You will not kill by Mel Gibson, portrays an American policeman in charge of a tragic affair: the murder of a woman and her baby. The scene takes place in the 1980s, in a town in Utah dominated by the Mormon community.

Inspector Jeb Pyre is himself a practitioner of this Church of Latter-day Saints, often singled out for its extreme rigor or its proselytism on the verge of sectarian aberration. His investigation will take him further than he would like in questioning his beliefs and the functioning of his church.

A double murder at the origin of the series

The story is all the more disturbing because it is based on a real incident. By order of God is an adaptation of the book of the same name (Under the anner of heaven in the original version), signed by Jon Krakauer and published in 2003. The work evokes the origin and the evolution of the Mormon church, but also a true double homicide of a mother and her son. (Spoiler alert) Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter Erica were found dead in July 1984 in Utah. She was a Mormon herself. His two brothers-in-law have been identified as the killers. Members of the same congregation, they called themselves prophets and claimed that some people had to die. Their sister-in-law with too “progressive” convictions and her daughter were among them.

The atmosphere of the series should be all the more believable as the writing of the script was entrusted to Dustin Lance Black. This author was raised in the Mormon faith until he decided to leave the congregation as a teenager. The series, however, remains an adaptation of a book that does not claim to be a faithful account, and some characters are purely fictional.