The Handmaid’s Tale has never been an easy watch, but the second season of the dystopian drama – set in a future where a religious order of male power has enslaved fertile women – is somehow grislier than the first. By the end of episode one, June (Elisabeth Moss), five weeks pregnant, has reconnected with the Resistance and stolen away to freedom, but not without the show moving toward full horror in its aesthetic conventions.

The Handmaid’s Tale is not subtle storytelling: the violence is always at fever-pitch, the dramatic stakes are unmodulated. And that can mean that its other themes – solidarity, resistance against tyranny, the concept of “gender treason” – slide by unnoticed. For many, the anguish of watching won’t be worth it. But the vision of a totalitarian society is realised so fully that the story remains gripping and its message vital.

(The Guardian, 2018)