MONDAY 19 AUGUST 2019

SURFACE TENSION

Late in its third season, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is adding a sickly gloss

to its misogynistic horrors, says Ed Power

Elisabeth Moss as June manages to cheat death once again (Jasper Savage)

★★★☆☆

As the misogynistic horrors and fundamentalist depredations are piled higher and higher, The Handmaid’s
Tale often teeters on unwatchable. Yet it can never bring itself to be ugly. That faintly uncomfortable truth
is underscored at the conclusion of the season’s third-to-last episode which sees the body of evil
Commander Winslow disposed of to the strains of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting”.

The sequence is almost sickeningly pretty. And maybe The Handmaid’s Tale has an obscure point to make
in juxtaposing a battered corpse and a pirouetting Eighties ditty. Or could it be that the show is leaning
once more into its uncomfortable addiction to cinematic gloss? Is it expecting too much that a series
unpacking the wickedness implicit in unchecked theocratic mania dare be repulsive for once?

Still, “Liars” ticks the boxes in other ways. We now have a proper storyline to grab hold of. June (Elisabeth

Section 2 /TV review