The Handmaid's Tale Review

The first season is close to a perfect adaptation. Reed Morano shoots Gilead in shallow-focus portraiture, red habits against snow and grey stone, holding on Elisabeth Moss's face until the interior voiceover becomes the only place any freedom exists. Moss does the best work of her career, playing compliance and fury inside the same shot, and Ann Dowd's Aunt Lydia is terrifying precisely because she believes every word. Then Atwood's novel runs out and the show has to invent.

What it invents is a loop: June escapes, June is recaptured, a Waterford negotiation stalls, another atrocity is staged for the camera to hold on. Season two in particular mistakes duration for weight, and suffering becomes a structural beat rather than a subject. The craft never drops, and Yvonne Strahovski and Joseph Fiennes keep locating fresh rot in the Waterfords, but a plot that resets this often spends its own urgency. Ferocious, beautifully made, and considerably longer than the idea sustaining it.