The Testaments: return to Gilead is a ‘magnificent coming-of-age’ story

The TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” was so “relentlessly bleak”, I had to stop watching, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Now, the showrunner behind the original series, Bruce Miller, has brought Atwood’s Booker-Prize-winning sequel to the small screen. “Brace yourselves.”

“The Testaments” picks up a few years after the events of the first book, when we meet the “next generation of Gilead women”. Agnes (Chase Infiniti) is the daughter of a Commander, attending an “elite preparatory school” run by the formidable Aunt Lydia. “Yes, that Aunt Lydia.” Ann Dowd resumes her role from “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a “genuinely savage Miss Trunchbull”.

Agnes is put in charge of new student Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a “Pearl Girl” brought to the school by Gilead missionaries and “generally suspected by the other pupils” of spying for the teachers. The two girls’ increasingly “close and complicated” relationship forms the “backbone” of the series.

Like its predecessor, “The Testaments” is a “disturbing” watch, said Aramide Tinubu in Variety. An “exemplary” follow-up to the original show, this is both a powerful tale of “girlhood, survival, rage and friendship”, and a “magnificent coming-of-age” story.

The teenagers are waiting for their first menstrual period, when they will become “officially eligible for the marriage market”, graduating from Plums to Greens and “eventually into the teal blue of the Gilead wives”. Despite the “palatial houses” and manicured gardens, “something horrific is always just within frame”.

Following her starring role in “One Battle After Another”, Infiniti brings “electric A-lister aura” to Agnes, said Ed Power in The Telegraph, while Aunt Lydia is the “same disturbing mix of contradictions” she always was. Despite its dark subject matter, there is “fun to be had watching young people navigate the trials of growing up”. The school might be “hell on earth, but it’s also ‘Mean Girls’ with a dystopian twist”.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” became “murky and frenetic” but this sequel “pops” with the pupil’s jewel-coloured robes, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. The tone is lighter and the pace quicker but it keeps intact the depiction of how a society can “backslide into regression and repression”. This is a “young adult epic for the ages”.

“There’s no case of sequel-itus here,” said Vicky Jessop in The Standard. “‘The Testaments’ feels just as urgent as its predecessor – and just as darkly enjoyable.”