'The Assessment' puts humanity's future to the test
Alicia Vikander and Elizabeth Olsen shine in sci-fi parable
Making the decision to become parents is a big decision. Which is perhaps why, in Fleur Fortune’s dystopian sci-fi drama “The Assessment,” the government makes the decision for you.
In fairness, deciding whether or not to have a child has much bigger stakes in the near-future world that screenwriters Nell Garfath Cox, Dave Thomas and John Donnelly create for the film. Climate change has permanently ravaged the earth, and while most of humanity is left behind on what is now called “the old world” to almost certain doom, a few elites have relocated to a fully sustainable enclave.
Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Hamish Patel) are married scientists who have been of value to this new world – Aaryan creates lifelike virtual pets to replace the real ones that were exterminated to save food and oxygen. They live in an eco-boho paradise, a gorgeously bleak exposed-wood-and-stone home by the sea with a full greenhouse and other amenities, and decide they’re ready to have a child.
But in their population-controlled world, that choice isn’t up to them. The government sends an “assessor” named Virginia (Alicia Vikander) to live with the couple for a week and gauge their suitability to become parents. In her black suit and high-necked white blouse, the enigmatic Virginia looks almost like a nun, and unsettlingly insinuates herself into the couple’s household, judging everything.
And I mean everything. As the week goes on, Virginia pushes every emotional button she can find to throw the couple off-balance, including acting like a disobedient toddler to see how they react. She sets up sinister tests, like an impossibly-complicated toy that the couple have to build together, or staging a surprise dinner party they have to host with their friends that Virginia is determined to sabotage.
Vikander is wonderfully weird as Virginia shifts between overgrown baby and sinister observer, and Olsen is a beautiful match as the driven Mia. The two women engage in a battle of wills, at times combatants, at times cosplaying mother and child. Patel gets the smaller of the three roles, but is effective and occasionally funny as the good-natured husband in way over his head.
Fortune keeps the focus tightly on the power struggle between the three, raising the tension with Jan Houllevigne’s elegant production design and Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s unnerving percussion-and-breath score. But sprinkled into the personal drama are enough references to the dystopian world outdoors to draw parallels to our own turbulent times. At that dinner party, Minnie Driver delivers a phenomenal one-scene performance as an elder who lived through the whole apocalypse, sipping wine as she chillingly describes the sacrifices that humanity made to keep going.
The idea is to deal with problems now, rather than let everything fall apart and then try to rebuild them later in a grotesque parody of the past. That’s true of a society, and that’s true of a marriage. “The Assessment” connects the two to eerie effect, making a film that works as both a sci-fi parable and a blistering drama.
“The Assessment” is now in theaters. In Madison, it’s playing at AMC Fitchburg 18.