The Testaments Review

Margaret Atwood's sequel moved the story from the handmaids to their daughters, and Bruce Miller's adaptation follows it into a corner of Gilead the original series only glimpsed: the school where Aunt Lydia turns girls into wives. Chase Infiniti plays Agnes, who has never known anything but the regime, and Lucy Halliday plays Daisy, a convert from Toronto whose piety is a cover. The pair are the reason it works. Infiniti's watchful, guarded performance earned her an Emmy nomination, and Ann Dowd returns as Lydia, now running the school and playing a longer game than anyone around her suspects.

Critics broadly welcome the change of register. Friendships, rivalries and crushes turn out to be a sharp lens on indoctrination, and Mike Barker's opening episodes find a buoyancy the parent show had lost by its final seasons, even as the story builds slowly. It looks handsome, if less striking than the red-cloaked tableaux that came before.

The reservations are just as consistent. Both girls narrate from some point in the future, and the voiceover spells out what the images have already made plain. The middle of the season treads water, and too many turns rhyme with things The Handmaid's Tale did first. It is a strong start that still reads, too often, like a sequel.