The Assessment Review: Elizabeth Olsen is (Bad at) Mothering

Jackson Gagliardi ‘27 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

TW: Sexual Assault, Suicide

The premise of The Assessment is simple: the world is a post-apocalyptic radioactive mess where people who rebel against “the state” get sent back to the Old World. People take a sort of medicine to live far past our conception of a human lifespan. Therefore, due to limited resources, reproduction is banned. The only way to raise a child is to be approved through an Assessment. 

It also offers several simple conceits for the two potential parents and participants in the titular assessment Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel). Mia has deep-seeded mommy issues because her mother was sent to the Old World after speaking out against the state. In addition, she has a love for rare foliage, including the oldest Venus Gourd in the world—that might as well be named Chekhov’s Plant. Aaryan is deeply obsessive over his work, which is creating artificial but tangible holograms of living things like pets, and he’s deathly afraid of fire. 

Enter Virginia (Alicia Vikander), their emotionless Assessor and the adversary of the film. What begins as a normal interview examining qualities that would make them suitable parents quickly devolves as Virginia adopts a child-like persona to test the couple. From observing the couple have sex to nearly drowning, Virginia will seemingly go to any lengths to test if the couple are really cut out for parenthood. 

Where the film really shines is through its performances. Olsen’s intense frustration and emotional exhaustion is palpable. Despite weaknesses in the screenplay that undercut the credibility of her performance, she still manages to squeeze any possible empathy out of the audience. Vikander’s calculated stoicism contrasted against her innocent immaturity makes her hard to pin down, as if she is just out of reach from truly understanding. Patel’s tunnel-visioned determination drives a lot of the conflict between the three, and his woeful obliviousness to much of the tensions within the story make him infuriating but sympathetic. 

Spoilers Ahead.

The film really struggles at actually harnessing the high quality performances, building upon its world in a compelling fashion, and following through with its narrative devices in an unpredictable way. Virginia destroys Mia’s highly delicate plant. Aaryan gets too obsessed over his work and loses track of Virginia. Aaryan needs to save Virgina from a fire. Faced with dissatisfaction with the state, Mia decides to follow in her mother’s footsteps and exile herself to the Old World. Once left alone, Aaryan makes himself an artificial family using his technology. And, of course, they fail the assessment. 

Cookie-cutter story beats could be circumvented through actually compelling characters, but despite the casts’ best efforts, the film lacks characters worth any empathy. An authoritarian state is established to have wronged Mia in the past, yet Mia demonstrates no dissatisfaction with the whole system until the final twenty minutes. Perhaps it’s because Mia and Aaryan are “significant contributors to their society,” as they so claim, which really means that they’re in the top 0.5% of society – a requirement for the assessment. In turn, much of their struggles feel trivial because the assessment in it of itself is a privilege that goes entirely unacknowledged. The result is a film that seems more concerned with crafting the perfect anti-parenthood PSA than providing actual social commentary on the facism and class disparity clearly being presented. 

The assessment challenges the couple’s sense of self worth, their dynamics within the relationship, and even their past traumas. In one of the best scenes of the film, a test is constructed where the state sets up the dinner from Hell for the two: a professor that Mia had an affair with and his wife, an ex-relationship of Aaryan’s, and his mother. What ensues is a highly tense conversation where deep secrets of their pasts are unearthed, underscored by Virigina’s chaotic antics at the dinner table.  

However, beyond that moment, the only thing that really keeps the story interesting is Virginia herself. Very early on, the line is muddled between what is assessment and what is not, making Virginia hard to trust and inherently antagonistic. At some points, she seems sympathetic, like letting Mia go visit her hospitalized sister for a night in the midst of the assessment. This moment of seeming sympathy gets immediately questioned when Virginia climbs into Aaryan’s bed and promises him a pass on the assessment if he lets her have sex with him—an uncomfortable scene with blaring tones of sexual assault. 

Ultimately, the film confronts and resolves the role of power in relation to Virginia in a somewhat satisfying way. After the couple’s failure, Mia finds Virigina’s home and asks her why they failed. Virginia, whose name actually isn’t Virginia, tells Mia simply that they weren’t good enough, and that everything that she did was “within the guidelines.” While this turn of phrase may seem ambiguous, it clearly implies that the job of being an assessor requires actions like sexual assault and constantly risking her life. This sheds an important light on Virginia, one that casts her as a mentally drained victim of the state, not an unemotional robot. However, despite providing an understable motivation for her to do the assessor job—her daughter drowned, and the state promised her another child if she became an assessor—the film fails to grapple with the implications of doing this job repeatedly in a compelling way, as the film opts to have her commit suicide at the begining of her next assesment. 

The film generally has an issue with answering the questions and conundrums it composes in a thought-provoking way, if at all. Mia uses her privilege to make the choice to leave to the Old World, which is so under-developed that it’s only identifiers are that its radioactive and its where the “bad people” go. Aaryan is finally given something interesting right at the end of the film, as he builds his new artificial family, without actually showing us how this isolation affects him beyond this. Despite really great performances and an interesting concept on the surface, The Assessment fails to deliver on most fronts. My Assessment: Mediocre at best.