Name: One Reason The Handmaid's Tale Won Emmys Best Drama
Uploaded: 2026-03-12T16:55:12.000Z
Duration: 6 min 45 s
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Since around 2008, when the DSLR revolution put full frame sensors in the hands of amateur filmmakers and videographers, super shallow depth of field has become something of a cliche in indie filmmaking.

Basic passive voice

For a lot of filmmakers, myself included, this effect was used not just as a tool, but

as a crutch to achieve that cinematic look.

Look, these days, super shallow focus is everywhere.

So it's really, really cool to see an episodic show like the Handmaid's Tale incorporate the effect in a systematic way as a motif of its visual language.

The director of the first three episodes of this show, the director who set the tone, is Reid Marano, a former cinematographer, she and her own dp.

For this project, Colin Watkinson, created an extremely concentrated aesthetic, one that is beautiful and terrifying at the same.

To capture the dystopian world of Gilead meant choosing the right camera and the right lenses.

Murano shot on the Arri Alexa minis in 4K and used lenses that open all the way up to apertures of 1.3 and 1.4, which means your depth of field is going to be razor thin and everything outside of that field is going to be blown out in a pretty uniform blur.

This shallow focus serves the story in three ways.

First, to capture the main character's point of view.

Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss, is a handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic and totalitarian state that has overtaken America, in which women no longer have any rights.

Handmaids are the last women who can still have children, the rest of society being largely sterile, and

they're forced to bear children for leaders of the regime.

Before the revolution, Offred lived in the America of our time.

And the story of the Handmaid's Tale is really the story of the transition between America and Gilead, told through the experience of Offred.

To dial us into that horror, Reid and Watkinson focus on the face.

It's hard to remember a show that relied so much on one extreme close up.

But Elisabeth Moss is definitely up to the task.

With a camera mere inches from her nose, the filmmakers combined a wide 28 millimeter Zeiss lens, used only for these shots, with a shallow depth of field to create intense intimacy.

With her bonnet on, it's almost as if were under a blanket with a character.

The shallow depth of field, extreme close ups are an effective way to get the audience to identify with Offred.

But they also point to an important theme that as a Slave in an authoritarian state where your physical being is effectively controlled by someone else.

The mind is where you have to retreat, to escape, to plan and to remember.

It's only a thin plane of focus, but it's still yours.

Second, shallow focus is used to help create the world of Gilead.

Unlike many dystopias you see in film and tv, Gilead is not a post apocalyptic world of rubble and ruin.

A meticulously manicured New England full of sunlight and green foliage.

Reid and Watkinson cite Kubrick as an inspiration, and

they echo a lot of his one point perspective framings and definitely capture the creepiness of that.

But for the women of Gilead, what's notable about this world is how little they know about it.

Think of all the knowledge that's accessible to you through the Internet.

In Gilead, women are not only prohibited from going online, they're prohibited from reading anything.

The result is a perspective that's extraordinarily narrow.

Shallow depth of field captures this perfectly because it literally narrows the visual information in focus.

The Handmaid's Tale is constructed in fragments.

You have America and you have Gilead, and

the show gives you pieces in between the two, but never the full timeline.

This is in part because the show's primary characters don't have the full timeline themselves.

This brutal new world, or at least the conditions that made it possible, snuck up on them.

But that doesn't mean it came out of nowhere that they aren't somehow connected.

For example, even though Reid and Watkinson adopt a more handheld verite style for the flashbacks, the shallow focus remains.

And they do this, I think, to suggest that both worlds suffer from problems of limited perspective.

In Gilead, perspective is limited by force, but in our world, perspective is limited by choice.

We keep our heads down, eyes glued to our screens, stuck in our echo chambers, while the blurry world around us changes.

It brings home a vital message that our rights are not guaranteed by the world.

We fight for them and have to protect them every day because they can be taken away from us if we don't pay attention to the world beyond our focus.

And because it's beautiful, everyone uses it to make their work look better, more professional, more cinematic.

And as a result, we get used to seeing it.

When I watched the Handmaid's Tale, I was amazed at how much the depth of field influenced my feelings about the characters and the world and the story.

It's just rare that you see this device used with such purpose so methodically and so effectively.

If you don't believe me, binge watch a few episodes of the Handmaid's Tale, then go outside.

I guarantee you'll have a newfound respect for how much there is to see.

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One Reason The Handmaid's Tale Won Emmys Best Drama

perspective

mental

intimacy

guarantee