Fleur Fortune’s The Assessment offers us a very sterile depiction of a dystopian future, where, like in Logan’s Run, certain remnants of humanity live in bliss and harmony housed in domes. There they enjoy a long life, clean air and food. But the best question this picture throws at the audience is, just because it’s called a utopia, doesn’t mean it’s not simply a fancy prison?
Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel lead this intense and futuristic drama as married couple Mia and Aaryan. Both content and successful in their professional lives, they jointly now submit themselves via an application to the governmental body to be allowed to have a child, as population control is vital to the sustainability of this new societal structure.
Eagerly, they await their assessor, Virginia (Alicia Vikander), who is all formality and focused as she arrives. Yet, once the questionnaires and sample containers are all collected and accounted for, that’s when the real test begins. The assessment is designed to test the applicant’s ability to nurture and protect a child, and Virginia suddenly and shockingly adopts a demanding, impetuous, and infantile persona that not merely examines both Mia and Aaryan’s parenting abilities but pushes up to and past their breaking points.
“the reality behind The Assessment is as cold and pointless as the test itself.”
Virginia is cold and calculates while appearing loving, tender, and curious. Having innumerable protocols available to her to test the mettle of the applicants she is assessing, Virginia, we discover, may also push boundaries of both trust and decency. The seven days pass like years as Mia and Aaryan struggle to stay in the game, for they can call an end to the proceedings. The tragic flip-side to tapping out like that: you can never reapply, ever.
So, despite the harrowing ordeal they must pass through, the couple chooses to see the assessment through to the end. No matter the cost. But what they find and the reality behind The Assessment is as cold and pointless as the test itself. I shall not spoil the ending, say, this movie provokes long and deep discussion in its wake. Both on the topics of the future of the species and the utopia we’d settle for.
Fleur Fortune’s direction, coupled with Magnus Jonck’s photography take, is into a spartan and bleak vision of a type of sanctuary. The supporting cast is fleeting in this chamber piece, similar to Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, with a nice standout being Minnie Driver, who, though she doesn’t look it, is old enough to remember when the world went to hell, and those fit to escape death in the “Old World” as she calls it, did so in a horrifying soliloquy that foretells of humanities demise coming at the result of its own hubris.
But it is the show-stealing performance of Alicia Vikander that brings everything together. Watching her run the gamut of emotions till finally uncovering the reality of what price she paid to be an assessor is brilliant, brutal and beautiful. The Assessment is not spaceships and laser sword sci-fi. It is fathomless and contemplative. A terrifying portrait of a reality that, the more time goes by, could very much become actuality?
"…just because it’s called a utopia, doesn’t mean it’s not simply a fancy prison?"
