The Assessment

Directed by Fleur Fortuné

Imagine Handmaid’s Tale mated with Black Mirror after a particularly bad date with Big Tech, and you’ll start to get a sense of the claustrophobic hellscape that is The Assessment. In her audacious feature debut, Fleur Fortuné gives us a future that doesn’t feel all that far off—one where the State doesn’t just influence reproductive rights, it owns them outright. In other words: Margaret Atwood’s nightmare got an upgrade, and now it’s running on AI.

We meet Mia (Elizabeth Olsen, glowing with that anxious, mid-upper-class polish) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel, here mostly to radiate weary complicity) as they nervously prepare for a seven-day home visit from the government. But this isn’t just a chat about tax records and parental leave. This is The Assessment—a dystopian psychodrama where the state decides if you’re fit to reproduce based on the kind of soft skills usually assessed by HR consultants and Stepford wives.

Enter Alicia Vikander’s Virginia: part behavioral analyst, part fascist therapist, part android dominatrix. She floats through their home in beige silk and clinical detachment, watching, testing, undermining. If Nurse Ratched and an Alexa prototype had a lovechild, she’d be it. And Vikander plays her with icy restraint so perfect it almost excuses how underwritten the character is. Almost.

This movie wants to be a feminist scream. And at times, it is. Mia’s gradual unraveling under surveillance—the forced performance of perfect womanhood, the desperate compulsion to be “enough” in the eyes of a system built to deny you—is chillingly familiar to anyone who's ever been called “emotional” in a performance review or told they’re “not quite ready” for leadership… or motherhood.

But where the film succeeds in tone—sterile lighting, blank interiors, sound design that hums with unease—it flinches when it comes to bite. The script circles around institutional misogyny, commodified intimacy, and eugenics-era echoes, but it never quite goes for the jugular. It teases the trauma of state-sanctioned gaslighting, but then it backs off like a dinner guest who brought up abortion and realized the host is Catholic.

Mia’s arc should be a fiery descent into rebellion, but what we get is more of a polite implosion. It’s as if the filmmakers were too worried about making their protagonist unlikable—which, frankly, is the whole damn point of being crushed under patriarchal systems. Give us rage. Give us madness. Give us something other than trembling resignation and a tasteful close-up.

VERDICT:
The Assessment is chilling, timely, and impeccably dressed, but it ultimately chooses poise over provocation. It’s a film that gestures toward feminist revolt, then sits back down and asks for institutional approval. The world it paints is terrifying because it’s so familiar—but by the end, we’re left craving not just critique, but combustion.

3 out of 5 Molotovs