The Assessment: A dystopian childbirth thriller that fails to deliver

Telegraph

08-05-2025

Who is worthy of being a parent, and who should be in a position to judge that? There's a kernel of philosophical intrigue in The Assessment, encased in a sleek shell of dystopian science fiction, and unfortunately flung a million miles away from audience engagement.
Earth, at an unspecified future moment, is a barren wasteland; only a skilled professional elite, living in hermetic bubbles, have access to the meagre resources remaining. Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) is a biochemist attempting to reap food sustainably, while her partner Aaryan (Himesh Patel) designs virtual pets. They live by the sea, all alone, in a cool concrete home which production designer Jan Houellevigue fills with eye-catching décor (a Mondrian stained glass window; needlessly giant sofas).
They want a child. This is no simple process: to meet the state's legal requirements, it must be grown ex utero using their DNA, but only after a week-long vetting process from a visiting inspector. This is the nudgingly named Virginia (Alicia Vikander), who arrives at their door, officious and prim, and immediately creepy in Vikander's Ex Machina mode (though not a robot). Before long, she's nosing her way into their bedroom, to take notes even while they're having oral sex.
It's when this stalkerish interloper poses as an impossible toddler – which she does for most of the next six days – that the film's ridiculousness gets insurmountable. She erodes the couple's patience, stomps on it, chews it up, spits it out. This is meant to be an extreme tensile test for their suitability to have a child, but also proves a nails-on-a-chalkboard ordeal for the viewer – all tantrums, scuttling tension.
The passive-aggressive combat between the two women is enough to make future collaborations between Vikander and Olsen a prospect to hide from. In the third act, Virginia becomes wantonly destructive, Patel is the victim of a pretentious rape scene, and we get answers only in a well-played but maddeningly belated face-off at the assessor's place of work.
The script is credited to three people, two of them married, and none of them the first-time director, Fleur Fortuné. Her film feels icily disengaged from other people's ideas, pondering them at a remove – as an opportunity for the actors, a costume brief, a means to an end.
It certainly locks us out, which is a shame, as the emotive potential of the concept was right there. Mia and Aaryan don't seem desperate enough, they're hard to care about, and the stakes of the story are correspondingly feeble. The Assessment makes a great case for not having a child as a dystopian fashion accessory, but who's arguing?
15 cert, 115 min; on Amazon Prime Video now