In the 34 years between the publication of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel, The Testaments, her 1985 book became a classic. It was adapted for film, for television, and became a staple of classrooms across the world. So, there was an anxiety about this delayed extension of the saga. Was this a cash grab? A desperate stab at relevance? Would it sully its predecessor? And then The Testaments came out and it was… good. So good it won the Booker Prize. That’s where the new Disney+ adaptation picks up: with a story that feels fresh and vital and every bit as compelling as the original.
Agnes Mackenzie (Chase Infiniti) is the daughter of a commander in the theocratic, patriarchal state of Gilead. She attends an elite finishing school run by the formidable Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd), where she is being groomed to lead a household and – God willing – become a mother. “I was a precious flower,” she muses. “Then why did I sometimes feel like a prized pig?” As Agnes stumbles towards an arranged marriage, a new girl, Daisy (Lucy Halliday), arrives. She is an apparent convert from Canada, but is keeping certain facts, about her parentage and her mission south of the border, to herself. In fact, almost everyone at this school, which seems to prop up the regime, is holding onto dangerous secrets.
By the time The Handmaid’s Tale TV show ended last year, it had expanded far beyond Atwood’s established universe. The story of June (Elisabeth Moss) had become a gritty civil war drama, mixing the conventions of dystopian fiction and spy thrillers. The Testaments, in a way, resets the clock. The focus here is on the wide-eyed debutantes from Gilead’s elite, who are largely oblivious to the oppressive structures of their society and, instead, focus on buttering up the aunts, who are tasked with finding them husbands. “Always be extra nice to the frigid sadists who are arranging your marriage,” Daisy muses darkly. This is Bridgerton meets Lord of the Flies; a young adult epic for the ages.
This YA ethos extends to the aesthetic. Where showrunner Bruce Miller’s The Handmaid’s Tale became murky and frenetic, The Testaments pops in technicolour (the girls’ uniforms are plum, green or pearl, depending on status) and the camera glides smoothly through the vivid iconography of the fascist state. Where Moss was a weary, downtrodden servant, the protagonists here are fresh-faced ingenues. Infiniti, who was so impressive in Oscar-winning One Battle After Another, is convincingly conflicted as a woman grappling with the narrowness of her future, but it is Halliday who steals The Testaments as the cuckoo in this nest of misogyny. Daisy is a natural successor to June: strong but flawed, brave but reluctant.
Adapting Atwood’s novel, Miller makes a few changes. Agnes and Daisy are now contemporaries, which allows the show to foreground its young cast. This also means that the show is less of an origin story for Aunt Lydia than the book – clearly, Disney thinks that it has the legs to run for multiple seasons. What’s retained is the book’s anger and urgency. “Even though [Gilead] seemed like it happened overnight,” Daisy observes, “there were signs it was coming.” The rhetoric around women’s roles and declining birth rates – the foundation of this authoritarian regime – echoes voices in both the “manosphere” and government (“I want more babies in the United States of America,” vice-president JD Vance, an avowed “pronatalist”, said in his first address). Disney might not be the most political broadcaster (to put it mildly), but, shrouded in allegory, The Testaments has something to say about modern America.
“I’m ashamed to say that I believed in Gilead once,” Agnes tells viewers, her opening testament. “I guess it’s easier to accept a story, even a childish one, rather than accept that the people around you are monsters.” There will be some who find the daily flow of news sufficiently monstrous, who don’t need fiction to hold a mirror up to society right now. But, for others, The Testaments will serve as an impressive follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, lightening the tone, upping the pace, but retaining its careful depiction of how a society can backslide into regression and repression.
