Roush Review: Chilling ‘Testaments’ Is a Grim Sequel to ‘Handmaid’s Tale’

“Nothing can be more powerful than a teenage girl.”

This bold statement, which concludes the first season of The Testaments, a YA sequel to the Emmy-winning The Handmaid’s Tale, offers a ray of hope after 10 chilling episodes of dystopian unease in Gilead, a perverted nightmare version of America. Out of sight are the Handmaids, those unwilling vessels of fertility whose unholy ordeal was the focus of the original series. Instead, we’re introduced several years later to a younger generation, “the most godly of girls,” the pampered daughters of powerful Commanders being groomed as future brides and, if very lucky, mothers.

Adapted as before from a prize-winning Margaret Atwood novel, the slow-burning Testaments isn’t as graphically grim as Handmaid. At times, when the tone veers into adolescent gossip, mean-girl rivalries, and mad crushes (including one tangled love triangle), it can feel like how the story might appear on a channel like Freeform. But at its best, which is to say its worst, the premise is as unsettling as ever in its depiction of young females whose natural urges have been suppressed and deemed sinful, their curiosity and education stifled, their ambitions and aspirations limited to home economics, wifely servitude, and piety cloaked in judgmental cruelty.

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In this color-coded student body, under the iron rule of the indomitable Aunt Lydia (the great Ann Dowd, a carry-over from the original series), the purple-clad “Plums” are the envied upper class, yearning for the day when they can ring the finishing school’s clanging bell to announce the joyful bloom of womanhood. First among equals is the unnaturally poised Agnes, played with a quiet, solemn strength by Chase Infiniti, for whom this would be a star-making role if One Battle After Another hadn’t come along first.

Agnes, “born in the sinful ‘before’ world,” sees her life through the prism of an elaborate dollhouse, sheltered like a fairy-tale princess, though made aware by her resentful stepmother (a memorably icy Amy Seimetz) that her heritage bears a mark of shame. (Anyone who’s seen the original series will understand almost immediately who Agnes’ parents are.) Her cloistered worldview shifts forever when Agnes is assigned by Aunt Lydia to be a “shepherdess” and guide to a new recruit from Canada. Daisy (the terrific Lucy Halliday), cloaked all in white, is a “Pearl,” part of a group of outsiders generally scorned by the Plums and viewed with suspicion as spies for the ever-watchful Aunts.

They’re right to be skeptical of Daisy, but not for the reasons they think. She says all the right things, that she fled progressive Toronto because it is “suffocating in sin … I pray it will be swallowed whole by the earth.” But there’s much more to Daisy than meets the eye, and as the series progresses, the perspective shifts back and forth from Agnes to Daisy — and occasionally to Aunt Lydia, whose backstory of indoctrination into the poisonous patriarchy of Gilead is finally revealed in one of the most riveting episodes.

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Standouts among the supporting cast include Mattea Conforti as Agnes’ discontented best friend Becka, who unlike her peers has no desire to marry, and Rowan Blanchard (Snowpiercer) as snarky classmate Shunnamite, or “Shu,” whose frustration and humiliation grows each time another of the Plums ripens into womanhood, leaving her behind and fearful of barrenness. Which could almost be considered a fate worse than death, if we weren’t so frequently confronted by the soul-numbing sight of the hanging bodies of those who dared to defy Gilead’s authoritarian rule.

But defy it they will. “These women would change history,” we’re told in the prologue. Change can’t come soon enough, and with a sisterhood of rebellion quietly forming by season’s end, we can only hope they pick up the pace when and if the show gets renewed. This tale is far from over.

The Testaments, Series Premiere (three episodes), Wednesday, April 8, Hulu

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