‘Ordinary is just what you’re used to.’

There are a legion of moments in the first episode of The Handmaid’s Tale that will haunt you. Offred’s tearful admission that her daughter was too heavy to run with. The sound of distant gunfire and what it might mean. A Priest, a Doctor and a gay man hung on a wall. The polite jolly hockey sticks mutilation of the one woman who dares to speak out.

None of them more than that line.

Elizabeth Moss’ Offred is a scream held in. Her internal monologue is shot through with eloquent, bitter sarcasm. Her external presence lets just a little of that through. She’s slightly too familiar, pushes a little too hard. Gains tiny victories in a world that will maim her without a second’s hesitation if she pushes too far. By one read it’s brave. By another, she’s attempting to commit suicide by Gilead. She’s enraged and contained. Bitter and desperate. Broken and fiercely defiant. It’s a note perfect performance that lives in micro expressions and held breaths.

It is, like the show itself, at times almost impossible to sit through. This is a show that lives in every kind of horror: physical mutilation, sexual assault, institutionalized bigotry and racism, constant barely suppressed violence. The destruction of the self for what the majority has decided is the greater good. This culminates in the Ceremony, where Offred is raped by her Master while his wife holds her down.  That sequence, with Onward Christian Soldiers playing as the camera focuses in on Offred’s carefully neutral face, is one of the single most disturbing things you’ll see this year.

It also embodies the inherent horror and tragedy in Gilead. The tragedy of the Handmaids, the Marthas, the women and men not high status enough to be part of the government and too terrified to resist. The horror of the fact that this society is fatally flawed, a curdled monstrosity of civilization that on some level knows it’s wrong and does awful things anyway because it’s too angry and stupid to do anything else. Because ordinary is just what you’re used to and when everything changes eventually you get used to that too.

That builds to a moment where the Handmaids are called to witness the execution of a rapist. The iconography of the Handmaids, their rigidly disciplined lives and the fundamental hypocrisy and evil of Gilead society collide in a sequence which is hard to sit through but impossible to look away from. Offred shakes with fury as the hypocrisy of a world that ‘protects her’ but allows institutionalized rape is channelled into a state execution. The anger of women with everything taken from them is channelled into the brutal, bare knuckled destruction of one of the State’s enemies. Not even their rage is under their control. And again, the show defaults back to Moss’ face. Her homicidal fury giving way to horror at what she’s done, at how cathartic it was. It’s a fiercely honest, open performance and it’s the exact anchor the show has to have in order to work.

But the rest of the case is just as good. Alexis Bledel’s Ofglen is a carefully parcelled character whose slow reveal gives Ofred the single shard of hope she has to cling to. Likewise Yvonne Strahovski as Serena Joy Waterford, Commander Waterford’s horrified, glacial wife. Samira Wiley’s Moira is a pillar of strength and kindness who lifts every scene she’s in.

Verdict: Four women. All victims. All survivors. All cautiously orbiting one another in an intricate fight for survival, not just for them but for their world. Nothing is going to be easy, either for them or for us to watch. Don’t look away. Watch. Television has rarely been harder, better or more needed than this is. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart