One of Elizabeth Olsen’s few post-Marvel starring vehicles, Fleur Fortune’s The Assessment debuted at TIFF in 2024 as one of the most divisive movies at the festival. Despite its intriguing premise and A-list cast, The Assessment doesn’t live up to its promise, delivering a sci-fi satire that feels overlong and underdeveloped.
The Assessment Review
The Assessment is set in a futuristic society where the ability to have a child is strictly controlled as a couple goes through a rigid and taxing set of tests to determine whether or not they have what it takes to become parents. This is a premise that, if more technology-focused, would not feel out of place as a Black Mirror episode. Yet despite an abundance of interesting ideas, The Assessment fails to deliver on much of its potential.
It is hard to look at The Assessment without thinking about the commodification and regulation of women’s bodies that is happening in the real world right now. That being said, the film could spare to be a bit braver about its themes, rather than simply echoing the sentiment that most audiences who seek out indie films will already have about the topic.
The script uses these ideas to create a world that is almost, but not quite, interesting. We hear exposition about events that happened in the past to create this utopian facade, like the extermination of all pets, but these elements are largely underdeveloped. The focus is, understandably, on the anti-feminist and fascist leanings of the society in which the film is set, but these actions could be made much more harrowing by expanding upon the other horrific actions of its leaders.
As with many high-concept sci-fi projects, The Assessment feels stretched a bit thin. The central premise — an assessment evaluating a couple’s aptitude for child-rearing — would make a killer short film. There’s enough meat on the bone beyond that to expand it to a solid 90-minute feature, but The Assessment clocks in at nearly 110 minutes, really struggling to come up with creative ways to push the premise forward.
The film begins to show its seams on a technical level, with sparse production design that feels vaguely futuristic but entirely indistinct. The film has some interesting uses of color throughout, but that is the only aspect of the film with a unique visual identity. The lack of aesthetic creativity is disappointing considering that director Fleur Fortune’s background is primarily in directing music videos, and that leap from music videos to narrative filmmaking often lends itself to visual innovation.
In their roles as the couple subjected to these trials, Elizabeth Olsen (WandaVision) and Himesh Patel (Station Eleven) give fine but largely unmemorable performances. We have seen both of them do better work in the past, but the one thing that does work very well about their turns is their chemistry, which allows their dynamic to grow and evolve in interesting ways over the course of the conflict.
Although her role is more of a supporting turn, Alicia Vikander manages to steal the show. It’s a weird, unhinged performance — especially during the second act, which gets wild — that feels almost like her Ex Machina performance dialed up to 11. Although she can be a good dramatic actress (she won an Oscar for her turn in The Danish Girl, obviously), Vikander is arguably more interesting when she gets to play around in this genre space. She strikes an incredibly effective balance between sensual, menacing, and vulnerable that few other actresses can achieve so effortlessly.
Is The Assessment worth watching?
Indeed, Alicia Vikander’s unhinged performance is the main thing that makes The Assessment worthwhile. Although it has an intriguing premise, it is not explored in a way that feels deep or provocative enough to be satisfying. As a result, it ends up being forgettable — not the intriguing work of satire that it clearly hoped to be.
The Assessment hits theaters on March 21.
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