'The Testaments' Review: Chase Infiniti in 'Handmaid's Tale' Sequel
From left: Blessing Adedijo, Chase Infiniti and Kira Guloien in 'The Testaments.'
Disney/Russ Martin
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A pickled fairy tale brined in the tears of teenage girls, The Testaments is different enough from The Handmaid’s Tale to be engaging, yet too exhaustingly connected to that series to stand as something truly distinctive and provocative.
I don’t think The Testaments is even watchable without having seen at least some of Handmaid’s, because despite extensive introductory text — “This story takes place in Gilead, a totalitarian regime that controlled most of the United States for a time” — and an entire pilot full of exposition, its stakes are completely tied to the Emmy-winning original. Meanwhile, for viewers who finished that Margaret Atwood-inspired drama last May, these 10 episodes are likely to generate responses ranging from “Wait, why are we still doing this exact same thing over again?” to “Well, at least this is brighter than the original.”
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The Testaments
The Bottom Line
Periodically potent, frequently derivative.
Airdate: Wednesday, April 8 (Hulu)
Cast: Chase Infiniti, Lucy Halliday, Ann Dowd, Rowan Blanchard, Eva Foote, Amy Seimetz, Brad Alexander, Mabel Li, Isolde Ardies
Creator: Bruce Miller, from the book by Margaret Atwood
There are terrific performances here, from budding star Chase Infiniti, up-and-comers like Lucy Halliday and Mattea Conforti, and known commodities like Ann Dowd and Amy Seimetz. But there’s something creatively suffocated about The Testaments, from the endless references to events featured in The Handmaid’s Tale to the cameos by key Handmaid’s figures to the various recycled archetypes to 10 episodes spent withholding a revelation I’m convinced every single Handmaid’s viewer will have already guessed.
The Testaments (like The Handmaid’s Tale, adapted by Bruce Miller) begins some number of years after we left June Osborne vowing to bring Gilead down for good and beginning work on a memoir.
Instead, Gilead remains functionally intact.
Agnes (Infiniti) is the daughter of a relatively important and fairly wealthy Commander (Nate Corddry) and step-daughter to Paula (Seimetz). The latter is less of a mother to Agnes than Rosa (Kira Guloien), one of the household’s many Marthas (put-upon domestic servants).
Like most of her peers, Agnes follows her country’s various repressive edicts directed toward young women. She can’t read. She can’t write. She isn’t allowed access to calendars. She surely can’t look at boys or flirt with them, however dreamy her Guardian (Brad Alexander’s Garth).
Agnes attends a preparatory school run by Dowd’s Aunt Lydia, who watches over the daughters of Gilead’s elite both literally and in the form of a towering statue in the school’s atrium. Like the spoiled Shunammite (Rowan Blanchard), the decent-but-dim Hulda (Isolde Ardies), and her comparatively blue-collar — her dad is, shamefully, a DENTIST — best friend Becka (Conforti), Agnes is a “Plum.” That means she’s on a course of education to prepare her for wifely duties, but until she has her first period, she isn’t eligible for actual matrimony. Oh, and it means she wears a lot of purple, in contrast to the Pinks (the younger children who wear pink) and the Pearls (white-clad converts from outside of Gilead who have chosen to follow the nation’s zealotry, but boast uncertain futures).
Possibly as a punishment — punishments are, unsurprisingly, very important at Aunt Lydia’s school — or possibly because everybody looks to her as a role model, Agnes is asked to oversee the development of Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a Pearl from the heathen territory of Toronto determined to set aside her formerly wanton ways and start anew.
Daisy has an unrevealed agenda, though, and soon forces like none Gilead has faced before (other than in The Handmaid’s Tale) will change the place forever (or at least until the next sequel/spinoff).
If you like world-building that tells you, at every turn, that it’s building a fictional world, you’ll enjoy the 44-minute opening installment of The Testaments, narrated by Agnes with a thoroughness that leaves little to chance or interpretation (even if many of the details were already well-established, albeit from a differe