Michael Atkinson
Fictional dystopias, as opposed to the real one we live in, are always just a few degrees away from being satire — every strand of sci-fi sociopolitical hyperbole thrums with our present-day absurdities, as it gets busy skewering run-amok state power. (Even 1984’s Newspeak can be read as sarcasm.) Still, the genre rarely gets as absurd as the new, cool three-hander The Assessment, which is not to suggest it isn’t stonily, humorlessly self-serious. It’s just that the dynamic under Orwellian stress here — parenting a toddler — is inherently ridiculous in reality, a daily cascade of puke, piss, babbled inanities, and pointless wreckage. It can be great fun, but it’s also a debasement the adult suffers with a tired smile.
Directed by a French music video helmer rather Disney-ishly named Fleur Fortune, and co-written by “Mr. and Mrs. Dave Thomas,” as if we’re in a mid-century Victoria Holt novel or something, the movie is cool and minimal, set almost entirely in a secluded modernist seaside house in a future without comfortable chairs. In this grim realm, where loyalty to The State is a proof hanging over everyone’s head, having a child is a privilege bestowed on a couple only after a seven-day-long “assessment,” executed by a government agent. (And even then, the birth would be “ex-utero”; vaginas are, it seems, entirely off-limits.) Mia and Aaryan (Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel) are a pair of would-be parents (they’re scientists; she greenhouses rare food-plants, he designs VR pets) who try to keep their chins up when their assessor, Alicia Vikander’s Virginia, shows up at their door, moves in, and slowly, day by day, turns their lives inside out. She manages this mostly by, without warning, toggling to a toddler identity, ostensibly to test how the earnest pair would cope with a thoughtless child’s impulsive destruction, errant wandering, and shitty eating habits.
At times an ironic riff on why parenting can suck — a geodesic playhouse arrives for the couple to assemble overnight, with untrustworthy Ikea-like instructions — Fortune’s film gets busy with the post-apocalyptic exposition once the assessment process conjures an unplanned dinner party, in which Virginia pees on the guests. Environmental collapse, “time of upheaval,” we know the drill — except there seems to be plenty of room and plenty of food, and, in fact, too few people. The State, wholly unseen and undefined, remains a diegetic unknown, leaving us only with the metaphors. You wonder, as Mia and Aaryan struggle to restrain their tempers, why a totalitarian state wouldn’t prefer disciplinarian parents — or why the home-wrecking rigamarole the couple endures would in any way “assess” anything that a dystopian state power would care about or need to control. Safe parenting? Virginia isn’t, after all, actually a baby, and even as she crawls into the marital bed, her stress tests amount to nothing much. (Besides, we all know that new parents learn how to be parents by parenting, and the tough parts come years later.)
The film is a bit of a mutant, secreting silliness out of fissures in a rock-hard facade, and, as you’d expect from its actresses, performed with a gripping gravity. Olsen’s lighthouse gaze routinely manifests significance when we’re not sure there is any; I especially loved the scenes after Mia gave Virginia a motherly forehead kiss and then seems stupefied by what she’d spontaneously done. Still, Vikander is the secret weapon here — she’s such a morph-able creature I barely recognize her movie to movie, and as Virginia toggles between android-like government agent and guileless woman-child, Vikander becomes the film’s unstable nucleus, just as a baby becomes the center of a new family’s cyclone.
Again, why? Dystopias need to make grokkable political sense. Ultimately, Fortune’s movie leans into the merely emotional, and even reconsiders, rather deftly, Vikander’s character as another victim of a seemingly pointless system. But the pointlessness lingers.