Director: Fleur Fortuné / Year: 2024 / Color / English Language / MPA rating: R / Runtime: 114 min
Where do babies come from? As everyone reading this hopefully knows by now, when a man and woman love each other very much… they invite a state-appointed assessor to enter their home for seven days to test their fitness for parenting in a series of endurance challenges that include forcing them to complete complex logic puzzles, trying to burn their house down with the hope that they can intervene in time to stop it, and observing (and sometimes participating in) their sex life. If they ace her tests based on her top secret criteria, they’re granted the privilege of filing the paperwork to begin the process of being considered as candidates to receive a child. If they displease her at any point throughout the week, they are instantly eliminated from contention with no option to appeal.
At least that’s how it works in “The Assessment.” Veteran music video director Fleur Fortuné’s feature debut takes place in an allegedly utopian future where aging and death have been all but eliminated. A revolutionary drug has given people the option to stop nature from ever taking its course on their bodies, but the lack of deaths has forced the state to start controlling the birth rate in order to ration resources. The result is that reproduction, the fundamental biological process that is quite literally everyone’s reason for existing, is now an elite hobby reserved for those who check every possible fitness box. Earth has subsequently been divided into the Old World, where people refuse to take the drug and live biologically natural lives that are filled with war, poverty, and disease; and the New World, where everyone lives in sterile, childless, prosperous immortality.
Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) are the epitome of marital success in the New World. They live in a sleek modern house while enjoying prestigious careers — he’s a digital designer who uses holograms to make hyper-realistic renderings of earthly objects that can help fill the void left by scarce resources, and she’s a scientist who specializes in studying plant life. With a thriving marriage and established professional reputations, all that’s left to do is have a child.
They initiate the bureaucratic process and are assigned to Virginia (Alicia Vikander), an assessor who moves into their home to begin the evaluation. The Kafkaesque rules ensure that neither of them are allowed to ask any questions about her criteria, they must simply submit to her erratic behavior. Some days she acts like an inquisitive technocrat, while other days she assumes the behavior of a small child and tests the would-be parents’ limits with agonizing temper tantrums. As the seven days drag on, both Mia and Aaryan are left to wonder what the curious process is actually trying to discern about them.
“The Assessment” backs up its high concept with immersive world building thanks to eco-space-age production design and hazy cinematography from Magnus Jønck that conjures the image of a world so obsessed with preservation that it talked itself into throwing away everything that was worth hanging onto. That futuristic backdrop becomes a canvas on which to explore one of the oldest ideas in human history: the often frustrating limitations of central planning. Would-be authoritarians of both the benign and genocidal varieties have long salivated at the notion that if only a smart person was allowed to make decisions for an entire society from above, choosing who lives and who dies and who works and who profits, all of the pesky conflicts and inefficiencies of modern life would be whisked away. Of course, it never quite works out that way, and “The Assessment” persuasively makes the case that some stages of life are far too intimate for any government to regulate in the name of efficiency.
None of which is to say that the film is overly preachy, as Fortuné and screenwriters John Donnelly and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas have crafted a compelling genre thriller that manages to build a world that feels both genuinely new and depressingly realistic if human society goes too far down the wrong path. In a rapidly changing world where we constantly feel the need to reevaluate every pillar of our society, maybe we all ought to accept that making our own children and raising our own families is one part of life that we’ve definitively figured out.
Review by Christian Zilko for IndieWire
