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The Assessment review: Survival comes with a price - SciFiNow

The Assessment review: Survival comes with a price

Elizabeth Olsen, Alicia Vikander, Himesh Patel, and Minnie Driver star in The Assessment. Our review…

This year’s London Film Festival has already given us one less than idealistic view of motherhood, with Amy Adams struggling with the downsides of having a baby in Marielle Heller’s acerbic Nightbitch. The couple at the centre of Fleur Fortune’s directorial debut, The Assessment, long for a child but in their authoritarian, post-apocalyptic world, a faceless government decides if they’d make good parents – and love hardly enters the equation.

Mia (Elizbeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) are scientists, living in an isolated, temperature-controlled house: she has established a system for them to grow all their own food, his work involves creating AI duplicates of animals. To become parents, they have to pass an assessment, conducted by a government official who stays in their home for seven days to observe, question and challenge their boundaries. Virginia (Alicia Vikander) doesn’t just come armed with a clipboard: her examination of the couple is microscopic and ends up changing their lives for ever.

Fortune sets her chilling vision of the future in a world where climate change has turned most of the planet into a hell-hole, where violent storms and extreme temperatures, coupled with a lack of water and food have made it almost uninhabitable. A select population lives elsewhere, under a dictatorship which provides them with comfortable lives – technology, clean water and power – but, with freedom of choice taken away from them, it comes with a hefty price tag. And those who refuse to knuckle under are banished, sent over the border to what is now called The Old World and left to their own devices.

The creation of Mia and Aaryan’s carefully controlled world is stylish and stunning: the immaculate interior of their sterile home is a stark contrast to their ramshackle greenhouse and its cobbled together irrigation systems and the rugged unforgiving landscape. Essentially a mix of the familiar and the futuristic, discomfort and something more unnerving lurks beneath the surface, and that applies just as much to the couple as their surroundings. It’s all exposed by Virginia, whose intrusive and constant presence – even at the most intimate of moments – is designed to test them to their limits. Yet, disappointingly, the film fights shy of digging deeply enough into their psychology to make it the satisfying experience it deserves be.

The performances, however, help make up for its shortcomings, with Olsen leading the way, increasingly frustrated by her life and showing every sign of rebellion. Vikander oscillates between the straight-laced examiner and temperamental child to such an extent that there’s always a lingering question in your mind as to whether she is genuinely human, or something else controlled by the government.

Overall, The Assessment gives us plenty to chew on, especially when it comes to sacrificing personal freedoms, but it never quite reaches the heights that the idea deserves.

The Assessment screens at the London Film Festival on 14 and 19 October. A UK release date has yet to be confirmed.