And yet, despite Schlondorff’s embrace of schlocky visual effects and headbangingly obvious symbolism, the film isn’t all that bad. The script is minimalistic in a typically Pinterian style (even though the playwright later declined to claim it as his work, saying that it had been considerably altered), meaning that more is said between the lines than is actually verbalized. Although the approach is markedly different from the confessional monologues Atwood gives Offred, the dialogue is spare and taut. Richardson manages to communicate Kate’s depth and sensitivity with very little to work with, and her performance contrasts effectively with Faye Dunaway’s cold steel as the commander’s wife, Serena Joy. Serena, a former televangelist, snips flowers from the earth with indifferent precision, and gazes serenely at Kate while dangling the whereabouts of her daughter in front of her like a treat in front of a dog. She’s also the only female character who’s seen mourning her former professional life, as she watches videos of herself singing “Amazing Grace” and conducts the old Serena with an unreadable expression and a lit cigarette.

The film mines rich horror out of the fact that the book’s primary villains, even in a state-mandated patriarchy, are female. Victoria Tennant plays Lydia, one of the fussy and sadistic “aunts” who control and train the handmaids before they’re assigned to houses. “Why do you think God made you a woman?” she shouts at a nun who insists she won’t violate her vows of celibacy. Another aunt drags a screaming girl to the dinner table after torturing her bloodied feet, while Aunt Lydia chastises the girl for "defiling" herself. With the women doing the dirty work, the men can afford to be generous. Compared to the chilly Serena, Robert Duvall’s Commander is half benevolence, half menace, alternately inviting Kate to his study for strawberries and Scrabble, and then violently kissing her as she writhes in protest.

The movie also renders Atwood’s more horrific scenes in vibrant color, showing the wives gathered in royal blue at a garden party to celebrate a handmaid giving birth in full view, and the handmaids, dressed in their crimson, full-length gowns, gouging a political prisoner to death with their hands after being told he’d raped one of their pregnant sisters. The book’s public hangings, set in Harvard Square, were filmed on the grounds of Duke University. And the camera lingers on the mangled hands of Kate's friend Moira (Elizabeth McGovern) after Kate encounters her at a brothel the Commander has brought her to on a whim. “We don’t need hands and feet for our purposes,” Moira elucidates, her bravado shaken for a second.

Nevertheless, the film was panned. “The movie seems equally angry that women have to have children at all, and that it is hard for them to have children now that men have mucked up the planet with their greedy schemes,” wrote Roger Ebert. Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers described the "ceremony" as “about as erotic as a gynecological exam,” and complained that the movie had “narrowed the focus to [Male Chauvinist Pigs] who like to put women in their place.” The film’s vision of the future, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Glieberman wrote, “is so poisonous and mechanical that you have to wonder: Is this really what our society is threatening to turn into, or is Atwood just exorcising her own fear and loathing?”