Kate Dennis directs television the unglamorous way: she arrives on someone else's series, serves it and leaves it looking as it did. On The Handmaid's Tale and All Her Fault that is a real craft, and it makes her hard to see.
Fi1m perspective
The Irvines' house in All Her Fault (2025) is mostly glass. Dennis and her co-director Minkie Spiro shoot it so that Sarah Snook's Marissa is forever visible to the people she cannot reach, framed through a partition or a window at exactly the moment a scene needs two people in the same room. It is a small decision and it does the work of a page of dialogue. It is also about as much of Dennis as anyone can point to on screen, and that is the difficulty with writing about her.
She crewed first. Through the 1990s she was a camera assistant and script supervisor on Cliffhanger (1993), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and Babe (1995), which is an education in how a set runs that most directors never get. "I crewed for ten years because I wanted to understand the whole process before jumping in and calling myself a director," she said in 2017, and the work since bears it out. Twenty episodes of Offspring (2010) and runs on Love My Way, Rake and Secrets & Lies were Australian series that moved between comedy and drama, sometimes within the same hour, and when she moved to American television in the middle of the last decade that was what she was hired to do: two episodes of The Handmaid's Tale (2017), GLOW (2017), and the first four episodes of Run (2020), which she also produced.
Our own reviews show the problem with judging her. The first ten episodes of The Handmaid's Tale frightened us more than anything television had done with tyranny, and we said so; but the fear belonged to Elisabeth Moss's face and Ane Crabtree's red cloaks, both fixed before Dennis walked on set for her two hours, one of them "The Bridge". On All Her Fault we were held for four episodes and then sat through two more while the series explained its coincidences to us, and we cannot tell you which of the eight are hers. Four are. Nothing in the direction announces where one director stops and the other starts, and Gypsy Taylor's pale, expensive wardrobe for Marissa and Jeff Beal's score, best when it goes quiet, are doing the visible work. A director who has spent ten years in continuity knows that matching the show is the job. It is a virtue that leaves no fingerprints.
In 2023 she said, "That's it, I'm not doing a show where an actor holds a gun." A kidnap mystery two years later is a curious place to keep such a vow, though nobody said the resolution had to be gentle. What we would like to see is the thing she has not yet had: a series that is hers from the first frame, so that for once we could say which of the good decisions were Dennis's.
Biography
Kate Dennis is an Australian television director. She began her career in the camera and script supervision departments on Australian and international films including The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Babe (1995) and Cliffhanger (1993).
Dennis has directed episodes of numerous series, among them Offspring (2010–2014), The Handmaid's Tale (2017), for which she received a Primetime Emmy nomination, Suits, Fear the Walking Dead, Preacher, Sleepy Hollow, New Amsterdam, Run (2020) and The Serpent Queen (2024). She directed four episodes of the 2025 series All Her Fault and has also worked as an executive producer on several projects.
