12/09/2024 - Featuring a standout Alicia Vikander, Fleur Fortuné’s debut film is a brash, sadomasochistic meal that’s as deliciously messy as it is transfixing

Alicia Vikander (left) and Elizabeth Olsen in The Assessment

In a shot filmed from a drone above, a young girl swims in the deep, blue sea. In the distance, her mother waves from the crags far away, calling out to her – the girl begins swimming frantically (is she drowning?) and dips her head below. When she emerges, suddenly now she's Elizabeth Olsen, poking her head above the surface. She makes her way out of the water and starts through an arid, brown, lifeless landscape towards a house: her house, where a disembodied voice assistant greets her. In Fleur Fortuné’s debut feature, The Assessment, boasting a screenplay by Mrs and Mr Thomas (the writing team of Neil Garfath-Cox and Dave Thomas) and John Donnelly, we never truly return to the allure of this mysterious opening. But its strands are picked apart and picked up again throughout the film, which enjoyed its world premiere in the Special Presentations strand of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Meet the gorgeous couple of Aaryan (Himesh Patel) and Mia (Olsen), the former a designer of virtual pets (we learn that the state previously mandated the complete extermination of real pets) and the latter a wide-eyed, sentimental botanist whose safe place is her standalone greenhouse. In this (brave) new world of all that’s left after twin global disasters of climate and population, the state legally grants aspiring parents the right to a child via ex-utero gestation, solely through a rigorous seven-day assessment. And so, we meet Virginia (an astonishing and gleefully perverse Alicia Vikander), Aaryan and Mia’s peculiar assessor who shows up decked out in a white and blue, smock-esque getup and childlike white stockings. Her first request is to swap the guest room for the couple’s bedroom. What happens over the next seven days should really be seen, rather than read.

From the film’s first moments, the choral-heavy score by Emilie Levienaise-Farouch is both eerie and transcendental, foreshadowing the Sisyphean task ahead – especially so for Mia, who is meritocratically committed to passing the increasingly illogical test that Virginia sets up for them, which includes roleplaying and constant observation. Production designer Jan Houllevigue goes all out to create a deeply estranging, colour-blocked home environment that doesn’t rely solely on the sterile blue-greys of archetypical dystopian worlds. Instead, the couple lives in a home replete with Mondrian-inspired stained-glass windows and a 1970s-style conversation pit by the ocean. Costume designer Sarah Blenkinsop complements this by being playful with geometry while keeping to a neutral palette: Mia opts for no bra and more flowing apparel, while Aaryan skews more conservative.

Looking too closely at the script reveals holes that shouldn’t be investigated, whereas trying to draw from the film a coherent commentary on the climate crisis, a biopolitically authoritarian state, or not-so-covertly disguised eugenicist practices is undoubtedly a useless exercise. Some moments are included just for the shock value, but it doesn’t make them any less delightful, especially among this trio of actors. Where the speculative elements fall short, the rest goes big: The Assessment shines at its most existential while narratively interrogating concepts like free will and rationality versus absurdism, rather than what we should (or shouldn’t) do when the world as we know it goes to hell.

The Assessment’s component elements are never uniquely shocking: there are no explicit visuals or gore, no truly gasp-worthy filmic moments. Instead, it’s the combo that ties it all together: this is Fortuné’s twisted little psychosexual thriller made possible in large part by the multi-personalitied Vikander, who will have fans of emotional sadomasochism on screen kicking up their feet and giggling long after the movie ends.

The Assessment is a UK-German-US co-production between Number 9 Films, ShivHans Pictures, Tiki Tāne Pictures, augenschein Filmproduktion and Project Infinity. WME Independent is handling its world sales.