‘Alias Grace’ Is A Savagely Political Tale That Is Also Sadly Timeless

Alias Grace tells a slanted version of a true story. In 1843, a sixteen-year-old maid named Grace Marks was convicted in Canada of murdering her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and was under suspicion of killing Kinnear’s housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Grace’s story captivated the public because of the lurid nature of the crime, and because of the doubt surrounding the case. In 1996, Margaret Atwood published Alias Grace, a novel that attempted to piece together what happened to Grace all those years ago. As a book, it’s tricky and seductive, and ultimately unsettling. Writer Sarah Polley and director Mary Harron‘s new adaptation of the book is much the same. But that’s kind of the point. The six-episode Netflix Original tracks Grace’s life story through a series of interviews and flashbacks, that often collapse in on themselves (as they do in the novel), threatening us to confront universal truths we try to sweep under the proverbial rug.

As a miniseries, Alias Grace is riveting, troubling, and lyric in its storytelling, but it’s also difficult to watch completely on its own. The Canadian miniseries lands on Netflix amid a torrent of news stories about powerful sexual predators being dragged into the light. Moreover, it’s coming out in a year where Margaret Atwood’s work has taken on new meaning. You could even describe the series as The Handmaid’s Tale meets Mindhunter. You see, the story follows Dr. Simon Jordan, a young pioneer in psychology, played with just the right amount of clinical affability by Edward Holcraft, as he endeavors to interview Grace (Sarah Gadon). Alias Grace is split between these cat-and-mouse sessions, Grace’s yarn of a backstory, and her own private monologue. Dr. Jordan sees Grace sympathetically, and as a prized experiment. He’s attempting to see if he can use psychology to lure the truth out of her. Sponsoring him are some well-meaning Toronto folk who think Grace, now in her early 30s, was framed as a teen.

But was she? Sarah Gadon plays Grace with cat-like glee. She nimbly flits from blushing innocent to calculating savage to downtrodden victim. Gadon masterfully finds the smudges between these various roles, until it’s all blended together into one extremely complicated anti-heroine. The confusion of the narrative and the almost dizzying repetition of key events creates a sense of suffocation. And Gadon’s Grace always seems to be sniffing for the best way out of the tumult. The cast is packed with an international roster of actors chomping at the juiciest parts of their roles. As Nancy Montgomery, Anna Paquin feverishly unleashes her inner mean girl. She finds a way to make her smiles look like cruel frowns. And Paul Gross‘s position (in my mind, at least) as the King of Canadian TV gives Kinnear an imperious charm, undercut by menace. He’s the master of the house, and you’re powerless to question it.

Alias Grace is a savagely political tale, dressed up in modest aprons and bonnets for the period drama crowd. Polley’s script makes Mary Whitney (Rebecca Liddiard), a maid who befriends young Grace, a far more political character than I recall in the book. Atwood peppers her narrative with allusions to the Canadian rebellions of 1837-1838, but here those events have more weight. Mary’s background — lower class, liberal, with some Native American blood — is used less as an aside than the foundation of all she is. There’s even a moment later on in the series where a black maid explains to Grace that she’s never been afraid of her. After all, she explains, Grace was found guilty of killing her “master.” Alias Grace also emphatically argues that reproductive rights are civil rights. It does so not with harrowing statistics or a raging debate, but with an invitation to feel empathy for the women ruined by the misogyny that rules their society.

Sexual harassment, assault, and coercion are shown in all their awful, mundane glory in Alias Grace. Pregnancy is not depicted as a miracle, but a plague that seizes upon the body. When a pregnant woman vomits in Alias Grace, it’s not a quaint sight gag, deftly signaling a new plot twist. The vomiting is violent and grotesque, like something out of a ’70s horror film. “She was in trouble,” is a phrase that’s used. In a time when women were subject to unchecked abuse and assault, and when they were denied birth control options, pregnancy wasn’t just an inevitability, but a mark of shame, and even a death sentence. Options were cut off, friends shrank away, and poverty would take hold of those willing to keep the child. Suicide was actually an option. So Grace delicately explains the allure of a back alley abortion as “one corpse out that way or two another.” Often that procedure, unregulated and performed in shadows, led to two corpses anyway.

Whether it likes it or not, Alias Grace also reframes The Handmaid’s Tale. (Again, it’s really difficult to not compare the two — Atwood’s influence aside, both have been adapted in a year where we are examining reproductive rights and sexual harassment with a microscopic lens.) Alias Grace illustrates that The Handmaid’s Tale is not a dystopian work. The Handmaid’s Tale is not a possible future. We are barely out of Gilead. Grace Marks is from there. It will only take the softest of winds to blow us backwards.

Alias Grace is now on Netflix.

Stream Alias Grace on Netflix