“The Assessment” - TIFF24 Film Review
This review was originally posted on Film Obsessive.
How do you know when you’re ready to have kids? It’s a question that has plagued generations of adults. Even then, what is a parent? Is it simply biological DNA that has been passed down to an offspring? The questions could continue on and on and on. It’s kind of miraculous that anyone chooses to have a child at all when these questions are constantly swirling around. But what if someone could answer them for you? An unbiased assessor who would observe your life and make the final choice about your potential parenthood. This is the premise for Fleur Fortuné‘s feature debut, The Assessment, that’s playing as part of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. The film takes a science fiction approach to what is a deeply personal and intimate decision.
Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) have submitted an application to become parents. They live in a futuristic world with limited resources. They must take daily supplements to help them survive and keep them stagnant in age. Because of this, childbirth that hasn’t been approved is illegal, and the punishment is being banished to The Old World. According to their assessor, Virginia (Alicia Vikander), Mia and Aaryan’s application puts them in the .1% percentile and grants them an in-person Assessment. For one week, Virginia will immerse herself in the couple’s life, providing challenges to test their ability to be parents.
First and foremost, Jan Houllevigue’s production design of The Assessment deserves to be a frontrunner come awards season. It’s a really lovely blend of retro-futurism that’s continually grounded by nature. While Mia and Aaryan’s home seems to be in the middle of a desert, Mia has a thriving greenhouse that allows her to conduct her botanical research. She spends her mornings swimming in the ocean. The balance between nature and reserved, modern, sci-fi is the entire thesis of the film. Essentially, The Assessment is asking the audience to take a deeply personal experience and see it presented as something as mundane and clinical as a yearly check-up. It’s quite impressive that this theme is so confidently portrayed in every single aspect of the film. From the utilitarian font against a whimsical color background for the title cards marking the passage of each day, to the wardrobes of all the characters, director Fortuné has created something richly purposeful.
Courtesy of TIFF
The Assessment is a contained film, taking place almost entirely within Mia and Aaryn’s home. The few times they leave, they don’t go far, simply to the surrounding desert. It’s only at the very end that the audience gets a glimpse of the rest of the world. Because of the way the film is structured, the bulk of The Assessment rests in the hands of Olsen, Patel, and Vikander who gives a standout performance in a film of standout performances. Her Virginia is an adult, but as part of the assessment, she acts like a petulant child. A few years ago, Vikander starred in the Mike Mills-directed music video for The National’s “I Am Easy to Find,” where she plays a character from birth to death with no help from prosthetics or CGI. The two performances are quite similar in their physicality, and it’s incredible that Vikander can effortlessly turn her limbs into the awkward limbs of a child at the drop of a hat.
Patel and Olsen are equally as compelling as the couple at the center of the film. It’s fascinating to watch what looks like a picture-perfect marriage devolve into something else. Olsen has the pleasure of delivering one of the funniest lines near the end of the film that leaves the audience and her character cackling uncomfortably. Patel is most known for his role in the not-talked-about-enough Station Eleven. Together, the two are an interesting, warm antithesis to Vikander’s seemingly unfeeling assessor. The Assessment asks a lot of its stars, but every single one of them is ready to lean into the script’s ever-increasing madness.
Inevitably, The Assessment will likely draw some comparisons to Black Mirror, although it isn’t as reliant on technology. It does, however, have that same sense of dread about our future. The world The Assessment is describing is one that doesn’t feel too far off, which makes it all the more bleak, but performances like these make it easy to hold off the dread for two hours.
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