The Assessment (2025, UK/Germany/ USA)

Director: Fleur Fortuné 

Writer: Dave Thomas, Nell Garfath-Cox and John Donnelly 

This review contains spoilers.

Content warning: discussion of climate collapse, infertility, child death, suicide, rape.

Fleur Fortuné’s The Assessment shares some themes with recently released The Pod Generation (2023) from (also French) director Sophie Barthes: near-future worlds with controlled and controlling forms of fertilisation, gestation and parturition. Both imagine futures of ectogenesis (use of external artificial wombs) and engage with eco-feminist concerns surrounding the ethics of childbirth and having a child in the era of the Anthropocene. But where Barthes’ film does so with a soft dreamy veneer reminiscent of the Pastel Enlightenment utopia of Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), complete with benevolent AI, Fortuné’s post-apocalyptic wasteland offers no such hope or comfort. Freedom and truth – and indeed safety and subjugation – come at a price. 

Originally written by ‘Mrs&Mr Thomas’ and set in the UK in 2027 (Nell Garfath-Cox and Dave Thomas, with a co-writing credit for screenwriter John Donnelly [who wrote for the brilliant British show Utopia]), The Assessment is as much about the relationships onscreen as it is the science future it presents. The science future in the final film is a little further down the road, but it is a believable very near future; it imagines a world with state-controlled reproduction. Similar to the ruined toxic future of the TV show Silo, birth control is state-mandated, justified by scarcity of space and resources, and only those who are selected and complete a full assessment are granted the privilege of a child. Himesh Patel and Elizabeth Olsen play prospective parents Aaryan and Mia, and Alicia Vikander plays Virginia, the government official conducting the week-long assessment of the film’s title. Mia and Aaryan soon realise that this invasive evaluation will test their parenting skills and psychological limits as they must care for Virginia acting (out) as a child.  

Overpopulation is a key issue here, there are two worlds in The Assessment: the New World has extreme privilege (wealth, health, longevity) but extremely limited capacity (I think it’s a dome) and the ‘old’, where Mia ultimately choose to go, is a hostile barely habitable but ‘free’ area of the Earth destroyed by the climate crisis. Mia is introduced as a botanist who has maintained and cultivated a greenhouse, including a rare specimen – a Phalaenopsis orchid (a symbol of fertility) – that belonged to her apparently radical mother, who was banished to the Old World as a dissenter. She cultivates and conserves plant life in a world where little can grow and survive without technological interference. Aaryan is also a scientist who develops/trains AI to generate haptic hologram house pets that are being used to replace the real ones that were culled as part of too-late measures to halt climate collapse. Like botanist and holographic plant architect Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in The Pod Generation, their work is about studying nature but also replicating experiences of nature that are now lost or forgotten (see also MR and the MIMA in Aniara). 

Producing new life is an extreme privilege in this resource-scarce future. Even more so, it is seen as an ‘indulgence’, a selfish choice in the new world where pharmaceuticals have allowed the acquiescent rich to not only survive but avoid death. Reproduction has been removed from the bounds of the human body (embodied pregnancies) and individual control (the State decides). New babies are not needed, there is no one to replace, and they instead become a strain on resources rather than necessary producers, consumers and carers currently required for continuing capitalist cultures. The prospective child – who will be lab-grown (in a ‘brat bag’) – is also a reward for Mia and Aaryan who have been both willing to live by the rules of this authoritarian state but also work towards creatively improving it through attempts to tackle sustainable food production and the need for companionship and purpose in the ‘new’ world.

“Even though we’re in this future dystopia, there is something interesting about the idea that the people who are creating, who are the most useful [like Mia and Aaryan], are the ones that have this privilege. I don’t think we really respect the people who are making the world a very safe and livable place, and so I was interested in that.” – Elizabeth Olsen 

In The Assessment‘s standout scene Virginia stages a reverse fantasy dinner party featuring: Border agent Holly (Leah Harvey) and her wife Serena (Charlotte Ritchie) who is Aaryan’s colleague and an ex and with whom, it is revealed, he applied for an assessment – and their adolescent child (I think both women are bio-parents via IVG). Also in attendance is Mia’s old/er adulterous academic advisor, Walter (Nicholas Pinnock) and his staunchly anti-natalist wife, an older woman named Evie (Minnie Driver). Driver is an underappreciated talent, and even though she is mainly in the film to infodump and get us up to speed with the New World, she is a scene stealer. Evie reveals Mia and Walter’s past affair with a line correcting her partner’s declaration that he still bears the ‘scars of [her] departure’ from his lab with the stinger: ‘[scoff] Scratches, darling. All down your back, if recall.’ Yes, Mother.  And finally, Aaryan’s actual but not-very-maternal mother, Ambika, who hates it when he calls her ‘Mom’. She’s played by the glorious Indira Varma, who also voices the Sjøhus (their smarthouse); Aaryan, therefore, lives inside his mother. The dinner party presents a plethora of versions of being, having, losing, co-opting and rejecting the idea and reality of the mother/hood.  

The aggressively child-free Evie reveals herself to be 153 years old, and through her monologue, shows only contempt for the new world and its limited and limiting scientific-medical breakthroughs. Despite clear actions to save parts of the world as it was – the diverse casting makes relevant points about race, privilege and class (the only brief representation of ‘disability’ is Aaryan’s rimless Steve Jobs-esque specs) – the bigger issues are left unsolved and remain in an unsustainable holding pattern underpinned by shaky State-sanctioned omissions and untruths. Initially, the citizens of the new world could take a drug that would prevent ageing and disease (a cure for death), but later, the State ‘reengineered the Senoxidine to prevent reproduction’ and curtail New World population growth. The Assessment asks big questions about the purpose of life for this imagined Generation Anthropocene where there is no natural illness, death, or birth.

In The Assessment, death can be delayed, perhaps indefinitely. Thus, the (natural?) cycle of life and death has been disrupted, leading to questions about the way the imagined future child functions symbolically. As Veronica Holliger neatly explains in a review of Rebekah Sheldon’s The Child to Come (2016), ‘the child is a kind of archive…it anticipates the future from a moment in the present. It is the archive of past and present that we send into the future as a guarantor of our continuity, of our immortality, of our extension into a time we cannot foresee”. Sheldon’s work in part builds upon Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), which argues that ‘the Imaginary form of the child’ serves as the ‘perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics’. Humans value the future of the species – as represented by the innocent child – over the present.

This ‘reproductive futurism’ prioritises the fantasy future of (non-existent) children who will have the ‘privilege’ of being our saviours. We have failed to, or reached a (self-imposed) limit on, improving the present, so we now insist that the next generation will be the ones who save us. We eschew the responsibility and place it upon imagined future generation/s. The child is an idealised heteronormative figure that, as Sheldon argues, limits the necessary and radical actions required to tackle/mitigate the climate crisis NOW. We can’t just maintain this world for future generations; we need to radically change and reimagine what the future could be. The State’s assessment process is focused on the figure of the imagined child (the hoped outcome) rather than any existing one or anyone else currently alive in order to maintain the present social order (control).

The Assessment asks if we are working towards a future that will be ‘better for our children’, what happens when there can’t be any more children? ‘Sterility apocalypses’ such as A Handmaid’s Tale (1985, 2017-2025) and Children of Men (1992, 2006) prospect futures of mass infertility leading to a huge drop or cessation of births. But The Assessment is not about the effects of population decline, but rather what happens if there are no future generations for the foreseeable future by choice. Or when that choice is taken away. We must live in the in the now – stay in the trouble of this world – rather than always looking forward to a fantasy future.

Mia and Aaryan represent the two worlds. Mia is rooted in the old natural world, and she tries to cultivate and recreate the green utopian hope of a past she can only imagine (she was born after The Border was put in place). But her greenhouse and the hope of sustainability are cruelly destroyed by her perhaps selfish attempt to have a child. A recalcitrant Virginia sets fire to her greenhouse in a moment of rage, destroying irreplaceable bio-objects and memories. Mia chooses to return to the trouble of the world beyond the dome and to death and disease. She chooses to live and die on a damaged earth and actively create responses rather than living in denial in a literal bubble. Aaryan chooses denial.

After Mia and Aaryan fail their assessment, in one of the most distressing scenes of the film, Aaryan shows Mia his newest project that uses advanced holographic haptic interfaces and allows users to touch, feel, and move the virtual object. He generates them a replica baby. At first, Mia is drawn to this fantasy infant, but when she picks them up and goes to smell the baby’s head, Mia drops it with a deadened thud as the spell is broken. Mia realises that her relationship with her husband and the new world cannot be fixed. Mia rejects the artifice, and Aaryan becomes entirely immersed in the lifeless (odourless) fantasy with his holographic imitation of Mia and their daughter. Aaryan, Mia, and Virginia all take different paths, and none of them are joyful, fulfilling, or complete.

The end to Virginia’s story is the key to the film. We are given insight into themes of grief and loss that have been woven throughout the film. After the assessment is over, Mia manages to locate Virginia’s address. Away from the rugged coastal location of her exquisite Mondrian/neoplastic-designed Sjøhus, Mia finds Virginia in a dingy urban apartment. A fractured woman as visualised in the image above (from just before the dinner anti-party), she, too, is a mother, but one who lost her own daughter in a drowning incident. She plays a child and plays out her own guilt and loss over and over (for 6 years). There is no term to express her identity; her role as mother has been erased and her actions as assessor allow her to punish herself and the elite under the promise that she will be allowed to have another child.

In exchange for the imagined future child, Virginia agreed to fail every couple she was assigned to, and it is suggested that this is not an isolated case. This State-sanctioned ruse, like ‘reproductive futurism’, focuses people on the future rather than their present torturous reality. Virginia kills herself, ending her suffering and guilt (she has taken it too far; is Aaryan her only rape victim?), but perhaps also shattering the assessment process itself with revelations that it is all a lie. No babies have been permitted in the New World for 6 years.

The Assessment benefits from repeat viewings. Too much information is held back until the end, for the twist ending that makes these, and in particular Virginia’s, complex and fascinating characters act the way they do. On repeat viewings, you have more time to spend with these characters and this beautiful and tragic world that Fortuné, Garfarth-Cox, Thomas and Donnelly have rendered as a warning of the world we are building, destroying, and avoiding. 

Would you pass?

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More from this director:

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Dream Thieves (2018, 13 mins)

Travis Scott: Birds in the Trap (2017, 14 mins)

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Further reading:

Full Evie/Minnie Driver quote:

“In the beginning all anyone could talk about was how nice it was to finally have decent summers. And then the summers never stopped. Unbearable heat, endless storms. No crops, no shelter. Nothing habitable. Famine. Disease. Countless species extinct. Do you know we tore each other apart over scraps. We’d finally done it: destroyed ourselves. All for greed and indifference. Then one day, those of us who were left, we found a solution: a New World. But we had to be smarter than we were before because there wasn’t room for everyone. Choices had to be made. It wasn’t kind or nice, but it was necessary for survival. You think because we’re able to drink wine and grow crops in greenhouses, and breed brats in bags, you’ve somehow conquered nature. You’re wrong. It’s borrowed. And anything you take from nature, sooner of later she’ll want it back. So forgive me if I don’t smile politely and go along with this whole fucking charade, while you risk everything we have just to scratch some vain and vestigial itch. Fucking hubris will be the death of us. All of us. I want no part of that. There we are. There’s the story. Was it fun?” [Virginia then pees on Evie]