The Testaments, now streaming on Disney+, has big shoes to fill. It arrives in a post-MeToo media landscape still shaped by the seismic impact of Margaret Atwood’s previous adaptation, The Handmaid’s Tale. Released in 2017, The Handmaid’s Tale quickly transcended its source material to become a feminist touchstone, inspiring a vivid visual and cultural language of resistance across politics, performance, music and the arts.
In Atwood’s world of Gilead, women are reduced to archetypes within a patriarchal rape culture: complicit, privileged wives; submissive house servants known as “Marthas”; or the Handmaids themselves, stripped to mere breeding stock for the regime.
As life in the US seemed eerily to catch up with Atwood’s vision, the hallmark red dress, white cap and down-turned gaze of the handmaids became iconic. For protesters, it provided a graphic symbol of the fate awaiting women in a world where the president has described himself as the “fertilisation president” “protecting” women whether they “like it or not”.
When Atwood returned to Gilead in 2019 with follow-up book The Testaments, she did so in the shadow of renewed assaults on women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights worldwide. The release of this adaptation of her sequel challenges viewers not only to face that reality, but to think about what popular culture can do in the face of cultural regression.
The Testaments also has to resolve the plot dilemmas established in The Handmaid’s Tale. Many fans had been disappointed that, after following along for six seasons, they did not get to see protagonist June (Elisabeth Moss) reunited with her daughter Hannah. Nor did we see an end to Gilead.
The Testaments returns to these themes while probing why Atwood’s world still grips us amid escalating crises. Can the series offer anything fresh, or has original show-runner Bruce Miller’s vision – mixing extreme violence with striking visuals – already run its course?
The aesthetics of Gilead
The Testaments looks strikingly different from its predecessor, although the two shows share a visual DNA.
Much like our own world, Gilead has become, in some ways, inured to tyranny. For the privileged at least, there is a sort of everyday acceptance recognisable from real-world examples of life under dictatorship.
Like the young audience it courts, Gilead’s young women – including protagonist Hannah, played with tensile calm by One Battle After Another’s Chase Infiniti – have grown up in a world where political violence and control of the reproductive body are explicitly intertwined. We pick up the story some years after the original show, although since girls in Gilead are not allowed calendars they don’t know exactly how long. We are told this in voice-over by Hannah, now renamed Agnes.
Another resonance with our own times is the importance of style as a means of both escape and control.
Disney/Hulu
The costume and set designs of new Gilead resemble a contemporary AI-authored Pinterest board. For all its pretensions to timelessness, this world has fashion. The handmaids’ Puritan-plain red line dresses have been replaced by neat Kennedy-era ensembles in gentler tones of plum, pink and white.
The scarcity we saw in The Handmaid’s Tale has been superseded by a pastel-toned, cottagecore fantasy of colonial mansions and horses’ manes flowing in golden sunlight. Images of containment abound. Characters fill the frame or are seen through frames, gates, tantalisingly half-open windows and a dolls’ house which uncannily mirrors the home of commander Kyle, Agnes’ absent adopted father, in which she is held captive.
For all the old money theatrics, obsession with bodies is never far from the surface. “The Plums” are so called because they are ripe fruit, waiting to be plucked by much older, powerful men – a fate which becomes assured when a girl has her first period. Violence is never far away either. While the girls attend a sort of finishing school run by disappointed ideologue turned resistance figure Aunt Lydia (Anne Dowd, reprising her breakout villain role from The Handmaid’s Tale), the peacefulness of their education is disrupted by constant threats of corporal punishment.
Female friendship and hope
The Gilead of The Testaments is a fun-house mirror version of our own times. People are entertained by watching violence against groups treated as less than human – but instead of TikTok or constant news coverage, it’s public punishments like mutilations and executions.
“God’s justice is beautiful”, the girls are told, as they view a scaffold (a public hanging site) which they are told holds members of a supposed sex trafficking gang, though they are also told the victim was really to blame.
Hulu/Disney
Obsessed with cleanliness, order, and control, this world is nastily prurient. It is fixated on spotting and rooting out impurity. It reminds us what is at stake when the state polices reproductive bodies.
Ultimately, though, it is the power of young women’s friendship and the inherent, ebullient anarchy of teen girls that holds the potential finally to bring down Gilead. This is what makes the show original.
Atwood has said she wrote The Testaments to offer hope. Hope, in 2026, seems like a dangerous thing: it can seem naïve given the demands of the current moment. But as the American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit puts it: “If the word hope doesn’t work for you, try ‘Never fucking surrender.’”
Aided by its talented young cast, The Testaments reworks Gilead into a space where resistance emerges spontaneously in a world structured to make it unthinkable. In this setting, girls’ friendships, their laughter and their power become seeds of rebellion. The result is a timely, absorbing reflection how we might at last burn the dolls’ house to the ground.
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login