Writers: Mrs & Mr Thomas, John Donnelly
Director: Fleur Fortuné
The BFI London Film Festival likes to include the odd domestic sci-fi in the programme, particularly the films that looks at relationships and families of the future – those Black Mirror inspired stories that stretch what humanity might mean and how technology will service society. Last year both Fingernails and Foe got major attention and, in 2024, late addition The Assessment puts future parenting on the agenda with a post-Climate Change society in which the chance to have a child is limited to those selected by the State. In exchange, Mrs & Mr Thomas, John Donnelly’s concept has beaten ageing through the taking of supplements meaning it is never entirely possible to know how old someone is, and the creation of simulated fabricants. You may not be able to have a baby, but you can have a virtual-reality cat (less of a drain on limited resources).
Couple Mia and Aaryan live in a self-sustaining modernist home but what they really want is a child, so they apply and Virginia arrives to conduct a seven day assessment of their suitability. With huge secrecy surrounding the process, the pair are surprised by the methods that Virginia employs and the different kinds of tests that they are suddenly subject to. Is this really testing their suitability for parenthood or is there another agenda in play?
Fleur Fortuné’s film is strong on the creation of scenario, giving the story a remote coastal setting that is both beautiful and bleak, allowing them the moments of imagining family beach trips but also exploring the rugged dangers around them. It suits the tone of The Assessment which, like Mia and Aaryan’s carefully designed home, reveals jagged edges beneath its smooth and perfectly controlled surface. And there are some lovely set pieces in their angular house, full of Mondrians and entirely unsuited for family living which the process of testing the couple’s resolve and their resilience is well managed.
Virgina arrives like a sci-fi Mary Poppins, neatly dressed and controlled until the games begin, and some of the best parts of the film are these early scenes of adjustment to the unconventional methods being employed and the extreme behaves that Virginia adopts to pull at the frayed strings of Mia and Aaryan’s marriage. The growing distance between them and their competitive attention is a high point while the uncertainty about Virginia’s own motives and the growing ambiguity around her character’s position in the house, inveigling herself in just a few days is Pinteresque, with far more potential than the film eventually delivers.
In the second half, it all gets a bit wild as the writers seek a dramatic conclusion, wasting a fuller cast at a dinner party that adds little and take the audience perhaps too far into Virginia’s motivation, removing the entertaining ambiguity that made her usual behaviour so inexplicable but compelling. As ever with these small-scale sci-fi films, once you go beyond the domestic it rather loses focuses.
Strong performances from Elizabeth Olsen as Mia, Himesh Patel as Aaryan and Alicia Vikander as Virginia keep it on track, but The Assessment doesn’t do quite enough to pass the test.
The Assessment is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
