In some ways, Alias Grace is Atwood’s ultimate statement about how men can never understand women so long as they believe themselves superior to them.

Because in spite of her admission of unreliability, Alias Grace is not suggesting we should doubt Grace’s past, that we should brand her a liar and write her off, or that everything she’s said has been false. In fact, the ending is barely even focused on Grace’s honesty, or on her innocence.

The series’ final question is why, exactly, watching a woman in pain is something we find entertaining. What do we want from Grace Marks? What version of her life would we find most appalling, most spectacular, most unusual or alarming or remarkable? How can she perform in a way that will make her a lowly, uneducated, poor, single housemaid even visible to a wealthy, educated doctor? What would the life of a 19th-century housemaid’s life have to look like in order for us, her viewers, to find it interesting?

Alias Grace does not present Grace’s experiences as singular; they are endemic of the pervasive sexism and classism of the time. Despite all its subtlety and ambiguity, the show is very direct about its exploration of violence against women and the dangers of male entitlement. It does not condemn Grace nor does it pinpoint just one straightforward monster. Men and their need to control women make up this many-headed monster.



Alias Grace’s greatest asset is the way it depicts Grace Marks’s thought processes. It’s appropriate that Grace’s own mind would be made up of separate pieces, and that the solution to the mystery would only be visible when you step back and look at all the discrete parts that make up who she is. The miniseries opens with a quick series of flashes to events that will come to make sense to viewers the longer they watch. It’s not exactly a new idea for starting a project about a character with a scattered consciousness, but it neatly sets up a miniseries where Grace proves as evasive to viewers as she does to Dr. Simon Jordan, her would-be psychological evaluator.

The plot,

It’s based on true events that happened in 19th century Canada, where a 16-year old Irish-Canadian maid called Grace Marks was convicted of murder in the death of her employer and was also suspected of murdering his housekeeper (a trial for the housekeeper’s murder was deemed unnecessary since the death sentences for Marks and her alleged accomplice, a stable hand called James McDermott, were already handed out). Apparently Atwood, in her book, took creative liberties to insert a few fictional characters into the story and make it inimitably more haunting and female-centric in a way.

As Grace begins to tell her story, we realize two things:

(1) Alias Grace is filled with layer upon layer of nuances, symbolism, and psychological game-playing that would’ve made it a really difficult novel to teach/study in a literature class, and (2) Grace is far better at these mind games than the (so far) good doctor seems to give her credit for! With a chilling assurance, she informs us (through voiceover) that she’s telling the doctor what he wants to hear, keeping things from him as she fancies. Like what? Are they the kind of things she believes he wouldn’t want to hear from a woman such as her (beautiful, young, supposedly delicate)? Or are they the things she doesn’t want to say because she doesn’t want him to really understand her motives? Her motives as a murderer or the accomplice, it doesn’t even matter. Either way, it’s quite startling when she warns Dr. Jordan, “perhaps I’ll tell you lies”, and then proceeds to inform us rather unapologetically, that she’s doing exactly that! Deception, for Grace Marks, is all part of the game she calls life.

The slow, measured pacing of Alias Grace makes the frenetic energy of its finale all the more thrilling. The finale is brilliantly crafted and, at times, downright terrifying. But it’s also deliberately inconclusive, and that ambiguity may or may not be satisfying to you. (It wasn’t for me.)

The characters,

I don’t know if it is because I’ve binged on the terrific “Mindhunter”, Netflix’s most recent true-crime show, but Grace Marks’ behavior was astonishingly similar to that of the co-ed killer Edmund Kemper. Both presented themselves, to the psychologists interviewing them, as they felt best suited their circumstances. To the audience, and the psychologists, they were versions of them that seemed far removed from the images of the vicious murderer (or murderess, in Grace’s case) that customarily accompany a crime, in one’s head. In the flashbacks, she is naive and innocent, but also smart and quite capable of taking care of herself.

Grace knows she’s unreliable, and she knows she’s lying. She’s performing for an audience. And she’s good at it. There’s something very scary about her. She is simultaneously vulnerable and strong. She’s a prisoner, a poor Irish immigrant, in an era where servant women are subject to the whims and sometimes lusts, of their employers. Yet there’s a power in the fascination that her case inspires. Dr. Jordan hangs on her every word, and those words are all she has.

Dr. Jordan is one of Atwood’s creative liberties, and in the beginning, it feels like he’s cast in the story simply to act as a storytelling tool. But the more the show progresses, the darker and more ominous his presence starts to feel.

Mary Whitney and Nancy have been portrayed as a great influence on Grace’s life. What makes each of them shine is how Mary is the only ray of hope in her life and how unpredictable Nancy’s actions and feelings towards Grace are.

Jamie stands out as the only “nice guy” in the series while Thomas, James, and Jeremiah are just forgettable and not the kind of characters who you may always remember.

The filmmaking,

Mary Harron’s visual treatment of the show is very aesthetic. She makes every frame of Alias Grace look like an impressionist painting trapped in the ugliness of the real world.

The direction is super minimalistic. Mary Harron often shoots Gadon in disorienting close-ups that are almost centered but not quite, leaving us the viewers feeling slightly off-kilter, and Gadon uses her gigantic eyes to draw us into these shots, before something – perhaps cold, perhaps alienated flashes in them and warns us off.

The camerawork is simple, intimate. The blocking barely contains any movement. It’s just a veiled Sarah Gadon, sitting in a chair. A flashier show (like Legion) would play around with angles and sound effects to make the whole experience more overtly scary, but Harron doesn’t need those embellishments. Over the course of these six episodes, she has instilled fear in almost every shot without trying too hard.

The cinematography of Alias Grace is awe-inspiring. Every frame looks very “royal” and hence poetic. There’s a dream-like quality about most scenes (even the unpleasant ones) which makes everything appear to be more upbeat and poetic than it actually is.

The mini-series isn’t overly brutal. It’s an exquisitely woven fabric with blood staining the corners, meaning, the violence is often in the language, as when a servant woman describes a death scene which is the result of an illegal abortion as smelling like a butcher shop.

I can’t say enough good things about Sarah Gadon’s performance. She completely nailed it as Grace Marks. We are shown how good of an actor Gadon is from the very first scene. Her facial expressions assume a matter-of-fact blankness that enables others to project their own perceptions directly onto Grace. She has crafted a creepy voice worthy of a place in the Creepy Voice Hall Of Fame. Also, Sarah Gadon’s eyebrow expressions deserve their own award.

Anna Paquin and Rebecca Liddiard played their side character parts just as well.

The only few actors which didn’t fit their role, at least according to me are Edward Holcroft and Sarah Manninen.

The sound design could have definitely been better though. Also, there are some visual themes that get repetitive.

The creators of this remarkable series are also, notably, all women, which lends a preachy but realistic depiction of the thankless plight of these immigrant women.

In conclusion,

Alias Grace is a handsomely produced, beautifully performed series, boasting superb writing and direction, that nonetheless holds the audience at arm’s length. I liked it but didn’t love it, and I’m hard-pressed to explain why it didn’t cross that gap for me.

I had high expectations from this series as I’ve heard that Atwood is a brilliant writer, but this show is super slow moving with a payoff that is predictable, especially if you’re into this genre.

But I find it impossible to escape the thought that perhaps Alias Grace is functioning exactly as intended and that I, a guy, am never quite going to understand the depths of oppression forced upon Grace Marks in any way other than academic.

Maybe, Alias Grace seems restrained because other stories like it are deeply restrained?

My Score: 7.8/10