The Telegraph (4/5)
“Dystopian or not, there is always fun to be had watching young people navigate the trials of growing up. Aunt Lydia’s academy may be hell on earth, but it’s also Mean Girls with a dystopian twist.
“You have to admire the sheer chutzpah that the producers have displayed in taking a respected sci-fi text and turning it into a sort of George Orwell version of High School Musical – a potentially disastrous gamble carried off with style and assurance.”
“Plum-cloaked in a YA-leaning, high school drama that owes as much to Pretty Little Liars or Gossip Girl as it does to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments gives us an apocryphal version of the Epstein files.”
“There are terrific performances here, from budding star Chase Infiniti, up-and-comers like Lucy Halliday and Mattea Conforti, and known commodities like Ann Dowd and Amy Seimetz.
“But there’s something creatively suffocated about The Testaments, from the endless references to events featured in The Handmaid’s Tale to the cameos by key Handmaid’s figures to the various recycled archetypes to 10 episodes spent withholding a revelation I’m convinced every single Handmaid’s viewer will have already guessed.”
The Times (2/5)
“On a school trip Lydia’s charges stand before a gibbet of hanged rapists and at a school assembly they scream for violent punishment against a man caught masturbating. But we’ve seen it all before, and it doesn’t feel shocking any more.
“Within the strains and tensions of a teen coming-of-age story there is a compelling sense that while the girls may be victims of male-dominated religious intolerance, they can also be complicit in authoritarian cruelty. But the show feels like another teenage drama set within an all-too-familiar landscape.”
The first two instalments of The Testaments are now streaming on Disney+, with new episodes coming every Wednesday.
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