The Super Bowl TV Spot for The Handmaid’s Tale is as Chilling as You Expected

Though Super Bowl Sunday is still two days away, TV spots from the big game are hitting the web early, showcasing new footage from this year’s highest profile releases. On the heels of the Ghost in the Shell spot that debuted yesterday, a second teaser for the forthcoming Hulu dystopian series The Handmaid’s Tale has dropped, giving us a (slightly) further glimpse into how the totalitarian society of Gilead from Margaret Atwood’s classic novel will get realized on the screen.

The teaser begins with several shots we’d already seen from the first-look teaser (below), but then it starts to debut some new footage, leaving us more unnerved than ever. Perhaps the most disturbing moments are those showing the Handmaids before and after their designated duties, which, as a part of a repopulation initiative, involve providing sexual services for high-ranking men with barren wives. In these shots, we see the Handmaids (clad in blood-red gowns that stand out in the footage with the force of a scream) reclining in various spaces, forced into making themselves vulnerable.

One especially chilling shot shows the Commander (Joseph Fiennes) dressing in the foreground while the crimson folds of a Handmaid’s dress are just barely visible behind him, drawing attention to the figure lying in his bed. With startling succinctness, this shot captures the power structures in Gilead through making the Commander visually prominent and the Handmaid all but invisible, with the latter resembling a rag that had been used and then discarded with hardly a second thought. It is the Commander himself who drives another central bit of new footage, in which he provides the cruelly pragmatic rationale that allows such exploitation to happen: “Better never means better for everyone.”

Check out the full TV spot above, and prepare to be rattled when the MGM Television-produced show premieres on Hulu on April 26. You can also revisit the first-look teaser below, and find Paste’s list of 11 things you need to know about the show here.