“The Assessment” is smart and sinister sci-fi of “The Handmaids Tale” school, a striking, minimalist parable about humanity’s failings in facing an inhumane future.
A geographically and architecturally stark setting hosts a grim lecture on family, population and the psychology of loss, with all involved presided over by a ruthlessly pragmatic and fascist “State.” And a fine cast humanizes the toll that takes on the psyche, and the true costs of a disaster twisted into a lonely, self-actualizing utopia.
Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel play Mia and Aaryan, a couple of high-value scientists living in a roomy, efficient, AI-equipped mansion on a remote rocky beach. She’s a plant biologist, studying and tinkering with everything from algae on up the evolutionary ladder, looking for future food sources. He’s a virtual reality engineer, perfecting the simulated behavior and tactile texture of a VR cat and a chimp.
You don’t want to know what happened to “real” pets in this future, under the “dome” that separates the “New World” from the Old.
This is post-climate change civilization, when a disaster has empowered a State to compensate for human pettiness, greed, pollution and waste. Simply adding a new baby to the populace requires state permission and state involvement. An “assessment” is required, and even if a couple passes, there’ll be no bringing a baby into this Brave New World the old fashioned way.
Sex is strictly for pleasure.
Alicia Vikander is the stern, primly-dressed state appointed assessor, Virginia. It’s going to take a lot more than their assurance that “We would be really great parents” to sell her.
Virginia is to stay with them for seven days, questioning and “testing” their fitness for this grave responsibility, and it is implied, strain on the “resources” of the state.
It begins with intrusive questioning.
“Why do you want a child?” makes sense. “How often do you have sex?” seems immaterial. And questioning smart people — scientists — makes it go more slowly. Because Mia in particular has questions about Virginia’s questions. Almost anything out of Virginia’s mouth is worth an “Is this part of the ‘test?'”
Virginia insists on a different bedroom — theirs. And when they have sex on the single bed they take in her stead, she sneaks up to watch.
“Just act as if I’m not here.”
As they explain their work and their daily routines, as they assemble a state-approved geodesic dome nursery/playhouse, Virginia watches, taking notes and judging with every glance.
It’s when she starts acting the part of an unruly, rebellious, won’t-eat/won’t-cooperate child, that this “Assessment” turns truly hairy.
The rational viewer can accept some of what’s going on as “EVERY parent should be able and qualified to handle this.” We’re all social workers when it comes to how other people raise (or don’t) their children. But the Darwinian extremes here are fascism laid bare.
The script, by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas (see below) and John Donnelly, ratchets up the pressure on the couple as it exposes traumas in their pasts and shortcomings in their personalities. Tests like a surprise dinner party with other parents and a child, relatives and that one rude child-intolerant adult (Minnie Driver, deliciously despicable) forced to contend with Virginia behaving monstrously reveal much.
The Oscar-winning Vikander lets us see the calculation in Virginia, and hints at her own “issues” and shortcomings. Is this “Assessment” really by the book?
Patel (“Yesterday,””Tenet”) lays bare the rift that being “the favorite” parent sets up, and the human failings Aaryan sees in his wife but not in himself.
Olsen makes Mia earthy but flinty, motherly with an edge, lawyer-sharp in her logic, sexy with an agenda.
Director Fleur Fortune, a music video veteran, insists on setting up a sleek, austere “classic” sci-fi future of under-populated affluence with big open spaces outside and inside the McMansion by sea — Mondrian stained glass window, the works. But the emptiness conveys loneliness and doesn’t hide the ugly realities of how such star-kissed lives are achieved in civilization’s idealized next stage.
She’d have been well-served to give the third act a vigorous cut, as the story reaches a conclusion and wanders into an epilogue that suggests (sci-fi) logical extremes beyond that outcome, which is anticlimactic by design.
But “The Assessment” is still a most impressive debut feature. It manages to chill and even amuse as we ponder the consequences of our impractical, self-destructive, selfish and politically shortsighted present in a future that might look utopian, with the horrific dystopian reality merely papered over by choice real estate.
Rating: R, sexual content, nudity, violence, profanity
Cast: Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Olsen, Himesh Patel, Leah Harvey, Nicholas Pinnock, Charlotte Ritchie and Minnie Driver.
Credits: Directed by Fleur Fortune, scripted by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas (Nell Garfath Cox, Dave Thomas) and John Donnelly. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:53
