When “Offred,” the first episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, begins, the audience is immediately thrown into adrenaline-pumping action as June (Elisabeth Moss) runs for her life and her family faces irrevocable fracture. It’s a terrifying starting point that conditions the viewer for an uncomfortable ride ahead.
Alternatively, “Precious Flowers,” The Testaments’ first episode, begins with orderly visuals of an elaborate dollhouse amidst greater opulence. There’s a sense of order, control, acceptance – and even pride – that’s present here that’s completely absent in the introduction to The Handmaid’s Tale’s world. The Testaments begins a little more than four years after The Handmaid’s Tale’s final episode, yet it’s initially difficult to recognize that they’re even a part of the same universe due to the extreme tonal shift at hand.
It was a little less than a decade ago when The Handmaid’s Tale first premiered in 2017, yet there is a shocking degree of parallels between 2017 and 2026. Horror, however, was in a different place, and there was a greater appetite for vicious films like Jigsaw, Gerald’s Game, Downrange, and Victor Crowley. The world has become much more desensitized to carnage and bloodshed, as if it’s just an everyday nuisance that needs to be compartmentalized. Accordingly, The Testaments’ world isn’t any less horrendous than what was on display in The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s just become commodified to such an extent that it no longer even reads as trauma. It’s Stockholm Syndrome to the nth degree.
The Handmaid’s Tale was such a splash of cold water to the face that got the audience’s attention because of its rampant sexual assault, twisted and torturous body horror, genital mutilation, and an oppressive government that makes Escape from New York’s political cabinet look rational. It presents a hellish world where its horrors don’t even have to hide in plain sight because there’s nothing to hide from.
The Handsmaid’s Tale‘s YA-sequel unlocks an insidious dollhouse of horror
Curiously, The Testaments reads as a YA-coded subversion of The Handmaid’s Tale’s norm, and in many ways it is. It also tells a story that’s even more insidious than its predecessor by normalizing and sugar-coating these horrors through a younger point of view. The Testaments presents its “opportunities” as aspirational inevitabilities that its younger cast of characters has been born into. Many of them have never even known an alternative way of life, whereas The Handmaid’s Tale is all about the anguish of that schism and how to return to the status quo. Gilead is the status quo in The Testaments.
The Testaments is a coming-of-age drama that follows a new generation of women in Gilead, led by Agnes (Chase Infiniti) and Daisy (Lucy Halliday), two residents with very different backgrounds who share an unexpected connection. Agnes and Daisy make their way through an elite prep school that’s designed to prime them for their obedient futures as wives. It’s fascinating to see Handmaid’s Tale’s aggressive nihilism receive a tie-dyed YA makeover that even plays into the burgeoning “micro-drama” space.
It’s a smart angle that rejuvenates The Handmaid’s Tale’s brand, which was admittedly flailing after six seasons. The Testaments draws in a completely new audience, while it still does enough to appeal to the original Handmaid’s Tale crowd. The same breed of relationship drama still exists, yet it’s impossibly more corrupted in The Testaments. These arranged marriages and prescribed fealty are something that Gilead’s youth are fighting rather than rebelling against. It’s their idea of a love story. The Testaments often feels more like a Freeform teen drama than a Hulu prestige piece. Even the series’ omnipresent voiceover echoes June’s use of this device in The Handmaid’s Tale, yet it’s turned into egregious, unnecessary narration that evokes the egregious internal monologues found in young-adult fare.
It’s no coincidence that The Testaments repeatedly turns to its introductory dollhouse imagery. It’s a convenient metaphor that displays the conditional happiness and oppressive roles that pull the strings in Gilead. Agnes and Daisy are drowning in a sea of poison, yet The Testaments deceives its victims through overpowering imagery of beautiful pastries, pastel desserts, and ornate tea parties. There’s even a “prom episode” that adds a Bridgerton quality to this horrifying story and pretends that it’s a fairy tale. At one point, a character remarks, “Gilead was so beautiful I could sometimes forget where I was.” The characters focus on dance steps, pomp and circumstance, and fancy pageantry that masks the abuse. It’s an Instagram filter of normalcy over subjugation and ignorance.
The Testaments‘ hidden mask of cruelty cuts deeper
Even the episode titles in The Testaments reflect a sanitized and repressed nature that focuses on beautiful lies and artifice, rather than the truth. Episodes have titles like “Precious Flowers,” “Perfect Teeth,” and “Green Tea,” which all hide the true horrors that lurk beneath these ideas and what they really represent. Alternatively, The Handmaid’s Tale would have episodes with titles like “Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum,” “Unwomen,” and “Jezebels.” The girls in The Testaments are so oblivious to life’s true dangers that Agnes has her own Little Mermaid moment in which she misinterprets a crude crack pipe for something beautiful.
The most chilling example of The Testaments’ indoctrinated delusion involves the young girls’ highly stylized and color-coded outfits that delineate their various stages and roles. It’s treated like a fun outfit to coordinate and accessorize with as yet another aspect of this carefully coordinated lifestyle. It’s a disturbing exercise that ostensibly turns all these girls into targets, and yet it’s treated like haute couture. The whole “Plum” concept that labels girls who have yet to have their periods is so simple, yet one of the most vile things that the franchise has ever done. This disgusting idea is normalized in such a chilling manner. It turns a twisted tool that’s used to mark young, vulnerable women into a fashion statement.
Girls are literally crying because they haven’t had their periods, and they want to be paired off with Commanders who are twice their age. It’s presented as a privilege that’s reinforced through a reprehensible cult mentality to characters who are too young to know any better. The whole Plum ritual is aspirational, and those who buck this trend are destined to become outcasts. The horror that’s so expertly weaponized in The Testaments is more akin to The Stepford Wives, Subservience, or even Village of the Damned and Dogtooth, rather than a more blunt and brutal examination of gender and status, like in Hostel, Society, or Revenge.
The Testaments has even created an ecosystem where women from outside of Gilead are targeted by “Pearl Girls” and drawn into a world where “women still have value.” They co-opt and twist this subjugated sex slave narrative into a world where women are valued, cared for, and given a clear purpose. It’s The Testaments’ version of embracing a “trad wife” lifestyle, albeit with a lot more carnage and cruelty. Funnily enough, the one Testaments episode that ditches its stylized sanitation is a flashback entry that’s set pre-Handmaid’s Tale. It’s also the season’s most gratuitous and brutal episode. It’s outwardly terrifying, and the episode that feels the most like a traditional horror movie.
Gilead’s dystopian system still inspires violence
The Testaments masquerades many of its horrors, but the series isn’t completely devoid of violence. There’s a toxic version of girl power that’s exploited throughout the series and channeled into a fiery fury towards men. To be clear, Gilead’s system is still deeply broken. The Testaments is just very particular about how its most overt punishments are done to men, rather than building terror from their freedom to abuse women. This is not a world where violence is erased. It’s just powerfully focused to elicit a very specific response. This illusion of control and agency creates even greater horrors that are interwoven into these young girls’ identities.
The sheer jubilation that Gilead’s youth experience during a man’s dismemberment speaks to the bloodthirsty and rabid tendencies that are bubbling under the surface of these seemingly “proper women.” They’re living embodiments of Gilead’s toxic veneer of compliance. There’s a level of reverence and awe in these girls’ reactions that’s comparable to the Sawyer family watching a butchering session in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Both are governed by self-imposed norms that argue for a simpler, more honest existence.
It’s fascinating to see both The Testaments and Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights wrestle with the same themes of conditioned normalcy and women’s relationship and curiosity with pain, violence, and death. Surprisingly, The Testaments seems to have more to say on this front as Agnes and Daisy head further down Gilead’s rabbit hole. Daisy has some frame of reference for why all this isn’t normal. Agnes faces a much more challenging struggle ahead that involves liberation from Gilead, but also a complete reeducation on how to exist.
Agnes’ psychological scars run much deeper than any mutilation wound from The Handmaid’s Tale. She’s so busy getting excited over marriage and celebrating puberty that she doesn’t even know that she’s trapped in a horror movie. Playing with dolls may be more pleasant than kicking and screaming through the woods, but the results can be so much worse.
The Testaments’ first three episodes are available on Disney+ and Hulu, with new episodes releasing weekly.
