Alias Grace feels less like fiction and more like terrifying prophecy

Slate

Sarah Polley’s six-episode adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel is set in a “dystopic, misogynist, theocratic near future” that sounds a lot like today's current climate, says Willa Paskin. “The 1996 novel is historical fiction, based on an 1843 true crime, in which 16-year-old Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant to Canada, was convicted of murdering her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his pregnant housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery,” she says. “But Harvey Weinstein, our pussy-grabbing president, and their ilk loom over Alias Grace; indeed, they seem as though they could be characters in Alias Grace, where men misuse women as if it were their right.”

ALSO:

• “The primness of the period setting often fights with the raw emotion underneath”
• Viewers are left adrift in Grace’s story without having any idea who she really is
• Alias Grace is “riveting, troubling, and lyric in its storytelling, but it’s also difficult to watch completely on its own”
• Alias Grace explores the real horror of the patriarchy