●●●●○

Airing Weekly Sunday 9pm on Channel 4 UK and Ireland

“[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his will become ordinary,” warns Aunt Lydia (a terrifying and brilliant, Ann Dowd) as she instructs a group of women during their training at the Red Centre.  It is the near future and the United States is now the Republic of Gilead, novelist Margaret Atwood’s ecclesiastical dystopia where most women are barren and all are the property of men. Aunt Lydia is teaching the remaining fertile women – the series’ titular “handmaids” – the structures of this radical state and the realities of their new role. Acclaimed Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss is Offred, our main character, whose dark commentary and flashbacks shape the screen adaptation of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Hulu’s latest venture with MGM.

The handmaids wear red dresses and white bonnets to hide their faces and to distinguish them from The Wives, dressed in blue, and The Marthas, housekeepers and cooks, dressed in green. The bonnets, intended to obscure the handmaid’s face from the public, have the opposite effect for the viewer: low camera angles allow us to see their harrowed faces plainly against the bonnet’s white halo which fills the screen. We are drawn into the world of the handmaid, let in behind the bonnet and into Offred’s thoughts. Often silent, Offred says so much with her eyes. When closed, we see memories of Offred’s old life, including her daughter. When open, we are confronted with the violence of a handmaid’s life in the new order. The camera will often show us Offred’s point of view, during flashbacks we shakily run through woods as if by her side, or we see the fading light behind blinking eyelids after a brutal beating. Reed Morano’s direction leads with Offred, not just in her commentary which echoes the original novel but in visuals too. From the beginning it is clear that this series will be a truly visual adaptation of a classic; lacking nothing and showing everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJTonrzXTJs

For those not familiar with the novel, Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, primarily in Berlin before the fall of the wall. It is the story of a political regime built on the abolition of human rights for women. A nightmarish version of an ultra-conservative social order, it plucks some haunting chords from history but remains, even on screen, Atwood’s creation. It depicts a world in which something that should shock us becomes accepted and normal, oozing into society until it is fully integrated. Returning to the Red Center Aunt Lydia instructs: “ordinary is just what you are used to. This might not seem ordinary now, but after a time it will”. Offred is sent to live in the house of the Commander (Joseph Fiennes) and his religious wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovsku), where, as a handmaid, she takes part in the monthly state-sanctioned ritual known as ‘the Ceremony’, in which she is systematically raped by the Commander whilst lying in the lap of his wife. This is state sanctioned rape in order to produce children within a ‘marital bed’. Morano strategically exposes us to the Commander; just enough to pique interest, but he is often absent, kept behind closed doors until his part in the Ceremony, where he is seen only as if from below the brim of Offred’s bonnet.

 

The series so far has been relentlessly violent. Offred is beaten, handmaids are tasered and one has her right eye “plucked out” for insubordination, culminating in a “particicution” where the handmaids gather and physically beat a convicted rapist to death. Morano does not leave anything to the imagination. There is also an eerie juxtaposition between these gruesome acts and the biblical language which runs throughout the show’s most violent moments -“if my right eye offends, pluck it out,” “blessed are the meek”, “blessed be the fruit” ring throughout episode, often directly alongside the most violent moments. The Bible is used to control and berate not just the handmaids but everyone living under the regime. Similarly, archaic language is spoken against the constant background buzzing of walkie-talkies, never allowing the audience to forget that Gilead is a police state;  “eyes” are everywhere.

 

Even we are watching. On the other side of the screen, we peek into the world of Gilead, unable to look away, apprehensively awaiting the next instalment.