Critic Reviews

[A] remarkable series ... Like [A Handmaid’s Tale], it’s a stern reminder of everything today’s women have to lose, and how little conservative legislation it would take to lose everything.

It does take six full hours to get there, but the journey — her journey — can be an immersive one. ... Terrific. Immersive. Melancholy.

Gadon is an electrifying lead, and as our potentially unreliable narrator recalls her journey to notoriety, director Mary Harron lets her claustrophobia simmer until it crescendos in an eerie fever pitch. [3 Nov 2017, p.54]

Alias Grace doesn’t wrap everything up tidily -- and at times can be a bit messy and far-fetched. ... The performances are uniformly first-rate, though, and viewers will get closure rather than any dangling cliffhangers.

Quietly mesmerizing adaptation of her [Margaret Atwood's] 1996 novel.

What might have been a rather talky script is enlivened by the peerless performances of Sarah Gadon (who played the romantically doomed librarian in the Hulu miniseries production of 11.22.63) as the wan but flinty Grace and Canadian TV regular Paul Gross as the bewildered Dr. Jordan.

“Alias Grace” is a story about storytelling — one character compares Grace with Scheherazade — which makes Ms. Gadon essential to its success. She is mesmerizing.

Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Alias Grace accomplishes something “The Handmaid’s Tale” did, but in an even more effective manner: it tells a story of one woman that’s also a story about women as a whole, and about the roles, fictional and otherwise, they’re forced to play.

Where The Handmaid’s Tale has a propulsive sense of urgency and a tendency to aggressively hammer home its points, Alias Grace operates on a much more subtle, hushed frequency.

Gadon’s extraordinary performance is matched by those of her co-stars; Paquin, all sugar and icicles in one swoop, is especially good, as is Zachary Levi as Grace’s friend Jeremiah, a traveling salesman and something of a benevolent trickster as well.