A commendable Chase Infiniti can't save Handmaid's Tale spin-off The Testaments

We’re back in Gilead, though it feels like we never really left—not the fictional theocracy that author Margaret Atwood built for her seminal 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale and its 2019 spin-off The Testaments nor the actual American dystopia we seem to be finding ourselves deeper in as the months go by. It hasn’t even been a full year since fans parted ways with June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) and her dogged Mayday resistance in the series finale of Hulu’s six-season Handmaid’s adaptation, which saw the slave-turned-vigilante successfully take out a plane full of corrupt, power-hungry Commanders—her baby daddy Nick Blaine (Max Minghella) among them—and free Boston from the iron-fisted grasp of the republic. It’s not entirely a happy ending, though, as June’s daughter Hannah remains stuck in Gilead and engulfed in its patriarchal system of moral obedience, strict surveillance, and fertility control. 

It’s there that we pick up with the streamer’s take on The Testaments, which was announced in 2022 during Tale’s run and was also created by Bruce Miller. Rather than the 15-year time-jump that occurs on page, this follow-up is set only a handful of years after June’s fiery finale. And despite her considerable efforts, it’s still very much a Gilead we recognize, all color-coded hierarchies, striking iconography, and a suffocating sense of dread. 

But our entry points into this patriarchal nightmare have changed. The Testaments is recounted by a trio of women, all with personal ties to Atwood’s OG housemaid. There’s Daisy (Lucy Halliday), one of Gilead’s so-called “Pearl Girls,” a sort of Aunt-in-training recruited from Canada to spread the fundamentalist gospel. (It’s safe to say, though, that her arrival isn’t entirely due to Under His Eye piety.) Then there’s Aunt Lydia, that chillingly devout enforcer, with the great Ann Dowd reprising her Emmy-winning Handmaid’s role. Lydia is now the headmistress of a premarital preparatory school that sets up Gilead girls for docile wifehood, but The Testaments continues its predecessor’s retcon of Dowd’s villainous character, underlining her ever-faithful facade with a subversive double-agent streak. And then, yes, there’s June’s daughter Hannah, though in Gilead she’s known as Agnes and is played as a teen by One Battle After Another‘s breakout star Chase Infiniti. 

Unlike the mother she never really knew, Agnes doesn’t know a world outside of Gilead’s gates. She leads a comparatively pampered life as the daughter of a high-ranking Commander and is one of the “Plums”—girls of wealthy families being groomed for marriage to Gilead’s elite, distinguished by their all-purple ensembles—among her prep-school cohorts. (Mattea Conforti, Isolde Ardies, Birva Pandya, and an excellently prickly Rowan Blanchard make up Agnes’s girlfriends.) It’s that privileged post that makes it all the more jolting when the bleak realities of the republic start menacingly creeping into Agnes’s adolescence, from the unwanted touch of a friend’s father to the stomach-churning torture of a boy who looked at her a beat too long.