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The Assessment is a black comedy in a mode you might call dystopian absurdism. Set in a ravaged post-apocalyptic world and directed by music video regular Fleur Fortuné, it stars Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel as a couple who want to have a child. To qualify as parents in this future society, they must submit to assessment by an official who will live with them for a week.
The assessor, Virginia, played by Alicia Vikander, duly arrives: she is a courteous, professionally formal woman in a crisp uniform, part bureaucrat, part old-fashioned agency nanny. She immediately makes the couple sublimely uncomfortable, standing primly outside their bedroom as they attempt to make love.
The next day, Virginia adopts the role of a petulant, volatile infant, forcing her hosts to play harassed parents — all the more anxiously since they don’t know whether they’ll get better points for being strict or indulgent. Further challenges come thick and fast, including holding a dinner party for a selection of guests guaranteed to raise the embarrassment factor — among them, an imperiously snarky Minnie Driver, who nicely overcomes the obligation of having to spout a whole swath of back story.
The sense that the couple have been drafted into a punishing game, with rules that may be entirely arbitrary, is heightened by Jan Houllevigue’s production design, their home very much resembling the designer prisons of many a TV reality show.
Written by Mrs & Mr Thomas (aka Nell Garfath-Cox and Dave Thomas), the film starts from a sharply focused premise, before turning increasingly wayward; it ends up feeling like a Black Mirror episode extended long beyond its punchline. The Assessment works best when it’s about the skewed psychological interplay — and in this register, Olsen and Patel are terrific together, their characters working like crazy not to be outwitted by an entertainingly mercurial Vikander.
★★★☆☆
On Amazon Prime Video now
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