The Handmaid Tale

Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship.

Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship.

Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship.

Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship.

Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship.

Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship.

Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship.

Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship.

Like the material it was written to complement, Adam Taylor’s soundtrack for Hulu’s adaptation of the dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale feels at once familiar and futuristic, hushed but deeply haunted. Sometimes, Taylor’s warping synthesizers and steadily mounting sense of dread capture the feel of an ‘80s slasher movie (“Chased”). At other times (“Ofglen and Offred”), it sounds like the lost hymn of an 18th-century period piece—a powerful (and at times powerfully unsettling) blend.

In The Handmaid’s Tale and Philosophy, philosophers give their insights into the blockbuster best-selling novel and record-breaking TV series, The Handmaid’s Tale. The story involves a future breakaway state in New England, beset by environmental disaster and a plummeting birth rate, in which the few remaining fertile women are conscripted to have sex and bear children to the most powerful men, all justified and rationalized by religious fundamentalism.