Harold Pinter never wrote out-and-out sci-fi, but if he had done it might have looked like The Assessment. A queasy and uneasy excavation of people’s motivations, its tension stems from confrontations deferred, which break suddenly in discomfiting and absurdist ways. Yet it’s simple, in set-up and execution. It’s easy to imagine this punchy three-hander being performed in an experimental theatre in the upstairs room of a pub.
Another Pinteresque aspect – it’s an actors’ drama rather than a director’s, and it calls for subtlety and sudden switching of gears from its performers, which Alicia Vikander, Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel all manage with real precision – Olsen and Vikander get the best of it, but then that’s the way it’s written.
The setting is the blasted dystopian future where there’s barely anyone left and no one can have kids unless the state sanctions it. Hence the presence of state assessor Virginia (Vikander) in the household of Mia (Olsen) and Aaryan (Patel), a couple who want to procreate and so have invited Virginia in to see if they’re up to standard. Mia and Aaryan know that the assessment will last for seven day but they have no idea what it will entail.
They soon find out, as Virginia subjects the couple to an increasingly invasive set of tests. Physical tasks, psychological profiling and questions about their sex life lead on to more onerous stuff – Virginia popping up while Mia is trying to give Aaryan a midnight blowjob. Virginia play-acting at being a young child. Virginia flirting with Aaryan. Whatever it is, Mia and Aaryan comply with Virginia’s wishes – anything to be in with a chance of having a baby.
Are they trying too hard to comply? Is that in itself a fail? Should they scold or punish Virginia when – in one of her terrible-twos moments – she’s throwing an almighty strop? When Virginia suddenly forces them to hold a dinner party, which is straight from hell (very nice turn by Minnie Driver here), how are they meant to react – with anger, forbearance or what?
It’s a parenting-as-drama picture of an ordinary couple in an extraordinary situation, though the world Mia and Aaryan inhabit is firmly in the realm of sci-fi. Shot on Tenerife, whose black volcanic sand gives everything an austere, otherworldly look, it takes little more than the setting to suggest that the planet is largely depopulated. Not much is left. Mia breeds plants in a glasshouse out on the rocky shore. Aaryan designs virtual pets (the real ones have all been culled). Their home is functional and techy. They wear clothes that are simple, almost monastic.
The world-building works. It’s simple but almost Kubrickian in its impression of there being a totalitarian system somewhere out there calling the shots, though Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin might also be an inspiration – all those dark rooms. There’s not much in the way of special effects – the landscape does most of the work.
It adds a hint of spice to know that debuting director Fleur Fortuné was struggling to conceive when the film was in pre-production, and that Vikander was pregnant while it was being shot. Both Olsen and Vikander play nuanced characters; the screenplay is far less interested in Patel’s Aaryan. Though Vikander is excellent throughout, sliding her character through the various iterations of Virginia – the real person, the professional assessor, the childish version – you’d award the film to Olsen and her superb display of a woman exhibiting grace under pressure. But then there’s a final scene between the two, when Mia has sought Virginia out to quiz her about the result of the assessment, that tilts it back towards Vikander.
After providing a remarkable soundtrack for All of Us Strangers, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch followed it up with this, and is remarkable again, in a different direction. Intensely mournful, she takes her inspiration from medieval religious music and the austerity of the plainchant-derived vocal lines matches the mood of the film to the ground.
It goes on a bit, is really the only thing I can level as a criticism. We get it, and then we are given it some more. They are being tested to destruction, this poor couple. Audiences surely don’t need the same treatment?
The Assessment – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
