Moss captivates in dystopian nightmare in ‘Handmaid’s Tale’

After the otherworldly social rituals and rigidly structured patriarchy of “Mad Men,” it was just a hop, skip and a jump into the realm of “The Handmaid’s Tale” for its star, Elisabeth Moss, who also serves as producer on Hulu’s 10-part television adaptation.

The first three episodes arrived last week, with new installments arriving weekly until the June 14 finale. It’s looking very good so far. Moss became a stealth sensation as Peggy Olson, emblem of a shapeshifting decade on “Mad Men,” and in movies such as “Listen Up Philip” (terrific, by the way) she cuts through the bull of the mansplaining protagonist like a buzz saw, without histrionics.

Her eyes often framed here by a literally Puritan bonnet, Moss is an actress ready, willing and subtly eager for this dystopian nightmare set in a brutally nostalgic near future. Even when she’s nonverbally registering the latest appalling turn of events, Moss activates the interior life of novelist Margaret Atwood’s main character. The series’ somewhat protracted early sequences introduce us to life, and death, in Gilead, aka America: The Second Edition.

This is the sternest sort of speculative fiction, shot through with gallows humor. Hulu’s adaptation of the 1985 Atwood novel, without which no “Hunger Games” or other young adult adventuretime dystopian knockoffs would’ve gotten out of the gate, has been greeted as almost supernaturally relevant to a nation now being run by Donald Trump. The world of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” in Atwood’s description, is the result of a populace refusing to “wake up,” even as women lose their money, their property, their identity.

Her husband murdered by border guards (Canada, this time, not Mexico), their young daughter captured, Moss’ Offred serves the Gilead society as a coveted handmaid. The environment in this near-future has been laid to waste by human-made environmental disasters, leading to mass infertility. Those with functioning ovaries, like Offred or her confidante Ofglen (Alexis Bledel), become the breeders.

“When they slaughtered Congress,” Offred tells us in voice-over, “we didn’t wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the Constitution, we didn’t wake up then, either.” When Atwood wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale,” she was hyperbolizing the worst of what she saw as dangerous Reaganera rollbacks in women’s rights.

We’ll see where the adaptation goes from here. My favorite scene in the Hulu version so far comes in segment three; it’s a nearly four-minute shot at a breakfast table, with Moss’ Offred, believed to be pregnant and therefore revered by her betters, being treated to a dish of stewed apples. It takes its time, but as Atwood wrote: Nothing in any society happens quickly, or without warning, and “in a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”