What is it? New adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s historical novel that boils with suppressed rage.
Why you’ll love it: Those craving another story of female oppression from Atwood’s estimable pen will do well to watch this six-part period drama. Writer and producer Sarah Polley has wanted to adapt Alias Grace since she was 17 and has clearly poured herself into the project. Atwood herself also acts as consulting producer.
We meet Grace Marks (a superb Sarah Gadon) in 1859, a young protestant girl who has fled from Ulster to Toronto and since been arrested and tried for the murder of her employers. She has been held in jail for 15 years when Dr Simon Jordan (Edward Holcroft) arrives to interview her with a view to petitioning the governor for a pardon. The story is based on a real double murder, but Atwood adds the doctor subplot in order to interrogate the wider themes of patriarchal and class oppression.
Polley’s dialogue often hits home when it comes to expressing Grace’s well-hidden fury at her lot. “You want to open up my body and peer inside,” she says in voiceover, while fixing the doctor with her pale steel gaze. The idea of cutting open and invading a body surfaces often in the book and here, too. But the primness of the period setting often fights with the raw emotion underneath, the immediacy lost in the monotonous formality of speech.
As so many of the words are Atwood’s, it’s hard to put this down to anything other than a mismatch with director Mary Harron. She fits the bill on paper but sometimes fails to extract the real guts of Grace’s harrowing tale. I can’t smell the blood and vomit, only the scented air of the floral gardens Grace dreams of one day inhabiting. Visually, it is missing the grit and soot of Victorian poverty, leaning towards the polite pastel of the conventional period mini series.
Following the housemaid through early employment, locking her door against the randy master of the house and her own drunken father, she befriends Mary Whitney (Rebecca Liddiard), a young woman who tries to school her in the ways of self protection.
We spend a lot of time staring at Grace; porcelain pale with eyes that burn and shoulders too narrow to bear the burden of service. The rest of the cast look at her, too, the mirror frequently catches her and, eventually, in the final shot, she turns that gaze back on us, which is a devastating touch.
Doctor and patient engage in long, two-handed scenes in which he asks impassive questions and she steadily recounts her story. Here, the pace threatens to stall but Gadon’s sure grasp of her character keeps things on track. This is her story and she is given room to tell it, however unreliable a narrator she may or may not be. The ambiguity is intact throughout, which is Polley, Gadon and Harron’s real triumph. Her guilt, or not, isn’t important in this story.
Each episode concludes with Anne Briggs’ heart-stabbing version of Let No Man Steal Your Thyme, an a capella call to womankind to protect themselves from men. As the climate shifts in how we view the treatment of women in 2017, this story of horrific subjugation takes on extra poignancy, adding the audience’s own fury to the pot. A heady brew, despite its flaws.
Where: Netflix
Length: Six 45-minute episodes, available from Friday 3 November.
Stand-out episode: The final instalment toys with truth and perception in a way that gives some release to the simmering ire underneath this story.
If you liked Alias Grace, watch: The Handmaid’s Tale (but hurry before it slowly disappears from All4).
