The New Yorker:

What’s most striking about the show, now in its final season, is not its hysteria but its lack of conviction.

By Moira Donegan

You almost forget that Elisabeth Moss can smile. The lead actor on Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” now in its sixth and final season, spent much of her screen time contorting her face in distress as she played June Osborne—one of a class of “handmaids” who are imprisoned, ritually raped, and forced to bear children in the show’s world, in which America has been taken over by a dystopian theocratic regime called Gilead.

Moss’s eyebrows raised in terrified pleading as she begged various Gilead functionaries for their mercy, their secrecy, or their help as she sought to escape. Her mouth twisted in horror and rage as she was subjected to the order’s inventive and brutally violent punishments, which the series depicted in gruesome scenes of women suffering amputation, eye gouging, singeing, shackling, whipping, genital mutilation, drowning, hanging, and being thrown off of roofs. Her jaw trembled in shocked exhaustion as she watched her comrades captured, tortured, and killed.

As the series progressed, with June eventually escaping Gilead and becoming a rebel leader seeking to take down the regime, Moss increasingly wore expressions of furious resolve: an unlined brow; hard, level eyes; a stiff jaw. “The Handmaid’s Tale” has been on the air since 2017, and Moss’s persona sometimes seems to have fused with her character’s. When the actress chats politely to an interviewer or bends toward an outstretched microphone on a red carpet, it is almost uncanny to see her happy and at ease after playing a woman in extremity over so many years.

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