Dystopian drama The Assessment, on Prime Video now, is an intriguing portrait of human frailty and the fragility of relationships. Some thoughts:
NB: The following contains spoilers for The Assessment. We’ve marked the part where they begin.
Plenty of movies have depicted the hellishness of societal collapse, but comparatively few have tried to imagine what a society might look like having rebuilt itself in the wake of an apocalyptic event.
The Assessment, the feature debut of French director Fleur Fortuné, belongs in that rarefied group, its frosty, sometimes awkwardly funny domestic drama sitting in the same subgenre bucket as Logan’s Run, Alphaville or Rollerball – all depictions of a rebuilt society that seems relatively comfy until you start to look a bit more closely.
In the years after a briefly-described environmental catastrophe, society has rebuilt itself in small enclaves that appear to be protected from disease by some kind of dome or protective field. Humanity’s numbers have been greatly reduced, and those who remain inside the protective field are subject to quietly authoritarian rule; no pets are allowed, food appears to be tightly rationed, and childbirth of the usual sort is strictly forbidden.
Living under this rule does have its benefits; medical breakthroughs appear to mean that lifespans have almost doubled for the lucky few (something we learn from Minnie Driver in a superbly acerbic cameo). There’s a harsh penalty for those who step out of line, however; they’re banished to the polluted ‘old world’ outside, where existence is said to be hellish.
Husband and wife Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) are two model citizens in this uneasy future. They’re both experts in their chosen fields – Mia in botany, Aaryan in computer science – but there’s a void they’re desperate to fill. They both want to have a baby, which in their world means having to go through an Assessment – a gruelling seven-day interrogation by a live-in inquisitor, of sorts: Virginia, played by Alica Vikander.
If Mia and Aaryan are successful, then a child will be grown using their genetic material in an artificial womb. If they fail, then their hopes of becoming parents will be dashed. And Virginia’s word, as she frostily reminds them, is final.
The Assessment, having picked up solid reviews at festivals in 2024, has since appeared on Prime Video in the UK. If you haven’t seen it yet, I’d strongly recommend stopping here and giving it a watch – it’s an understated yet worthwhile little genre piece.
For those who have seen it, there are moments in its duration that are genuinely thought-provoking and worth further exploration. So here goes…
Some extra, just for you (spoilers from here)
It soon becomes clear that Virginia’s assessment of Mia and Aaryan won’t be a typical box-ticking exercise. Clipped and crisply dressed at first, Virginia soon takes on a protean quality, adopting different personas in a seeming attempt to see how the couple will react to the stresses of parenthood. One day, she’s behaving like a toddler and making a mess of the kitchen. On another, she’s playing one partner off against the other, or generally behaving like a stroppy teenager.
Vikander’s no stranger to sci-fi chamber pieces – she was terrific in Alex Garland’s 2015 thriller, Ex Machina, in which she played a robot which may or may not be sentient. Virginia is a similar kind of enigma – so much so that The Assessment also had me wondering for a second whether she was going to turn out to be some sort of android.
It’s an unusual, slippery performance, but one laced with a certain vulnerability and sadness beneath it all. The reason for this only becomes clear later: Virginia (not her real name) was once a parent; still grieving the loss of an eight year-old daughter, she’s become an assessor in the vain hope that the future state will make good on its promise to let her have another child.
The assessment itself turns out to be a sham: the government only lets a vanishingly small number of couples actually have children, and so it’s the job of assessors like Virginia to find the slightest pretext to fail everyone she scrutinises. The point Fortuné and her team of writers appear to make is that there’s no such thing as a perfect parent. Probe and scrutinise any human being long enough, and you’ll find the weak points that make them lose their temper, the hangups, the neuroses, the unseemly desires.
The Assessment as a whole is a muted study of relationships and how flimsy they can be. Olsen and Patel are both superb as the seemingly ideal couple whose differing personalities and viewpoints only become more apparent under Virginia’s microscope. Aaryan is immersed a digital fantasy world, his day job being to use voice prompts to create holographic re-creations of extinct animals; flesh-and-blood pets having been culled decades earlier in a touch akin to Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep.
Mia, on the other hand, is connected almost elementally to the real world. We first see her swimming in the roiling sea outside their futuristic, Mondrian-inspired home. She spends day after day in her greenhouse, tending to her plants – including an orchid left behind by her estranged, dissident mother. Aaryan, who has a phobia of fire, even has a brief vision of his wife in what appears to be a burning dress.
Ultimately, the differences between Mia and Aaryan become irreconcilable. Where he’s happy enough in a digital fantasy, playing in his barren garden with a holographic daughter he’s dreamed up himself, Mia recoils at the artifice. She craves the earthiness of the real world – polluted and potentially deadly though it might be – that she eventually leaves the future state’s shelter entirely. (This brief segment, all dust and grey concrete, recalls Alfonso Cuaron’s unforgettably bleak Children Of Men.)
Although The Assessment doesn’t exactly overstate all its themes, it’s possible to read it as a comment on our present-day society’s sometimes prescriptive, inquisitorial nature. Social media positively encourages us to comment and judge each other. There are entire forums and websites devoted to parenting and arguing over the specifics of what makes a good or bad role model for a child. Just as certain platforms on the internet can make us feel as though just about everyone else is a better person than we are, or at least having more fun, the assessment of this film’s title leaves its protagonists anxiously looking inwards and wondering aloud at their own flaws.
The Assessment’s final irony being that even the assessor herself is subject to the same frailties as everyone else. It’s possible to detect a growing frisson between Virginia and Aaryan, and envy at the seeming perfection in the life Mia’s built – emotions that come spluttering to the surface when Virginia forces herself on Aaryan and vandalises Mia’s greenhouse.
In the concluding scenes, Mia forces Virginia to confront her own actions – the conversation also, seemingly, making Virginia realise that she’ll never get the child she was promised. If the state can string along seemingly perfect couples like Mia and Aaryan, then they’re probably lying to her, too.
The Assessment is a quiet murmur of a genre piece. It’s a touch too long at almost two hours, perhaps, and laced with the odd scene where the tone lands somewhere awkwardly between arthouse and black comedy. All the same, it’s one of those films that keeps lingering in the mind; the poignant tone of its performances, the minimalism in its design, and the gentle humanism in its underlying theme: that we should embrace our flaws as individuals rather than try to conform or tamp them down.
The Assessment is available to stream now on Prime Video.
—Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
