Every Version of The Handmaid's Tale

Every adaptation strips something. The 1990 film loses Atwood's layered irony; the Hulu series, brilliant in its first two seasons, eventually sprawls into a different kind of story. The novel stays close to Offred's interior voice, which is where the horror actually lives. Atwood wrote it as a found document, framed by a fictional academic conference in 2195 where scholars debate its authenticity. That formal trick is irreplaceable: it promises survival while denying certainty. No screen version has found an equivalent.

Volker Schlondorff's adaptation, with a script by Harold Pinter and Natasha Richardson in the lead, has been largely buried by the TV series. That is a shame. Pinter strips the story to its essential transactions, and Richardson plays Offred with a controlled, almost dissociated calm that feels truer to the novel's narrator than Elisabeth Moss's rawer, externalized grief. It is a cold film, deliberately, and it rewards patience. Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall give it a theatrical menace the TV series never quite matched.

Season 1 of the Hulu series is close to perfect television. Season 2, which moves beyond the novel into original territory, is still gripping. By Season 3 the show has shifted from a portrait of systemic oppression into a rescue thriller, and the cycle of capture and near-escape becomes mechanical. The final seasons offer individual strong episodes but no longer have the tonal control that made the first season so disturbing. Watch Seasons 1 and 2, then read The Testaments for the resolution, and let the 2026 spinoff decide whether it earns a third act.