You're bad in a bad movie and should feel bad
dir: Fleur Fortuné
2025
At this stage, I think it has become redundant to say things like “this new sci fi film is set in a dystopian future”, because when I look at the sci fi flicks I’ve watched in the last couple of years, the last one that wasn’t set in a bleak, dystopian future was… no idea. Maybe After Yang, that was the least bleak. None of them foretell a future that isn’t grim, where there aren’t vast wastelands or forbidden zones everywhere, where the world isn’t scarred by climate change related disasters. They’re not all Mad Max, but they’re not far off.
So, yes, in this latest film that I watched, called The Assessment, terrible things have happened to the world, but a select few live in some domed place somehow exempt from the ravages of anthropomorphic climate change. These select few live elongated lives, but are forbidden from procreating naturally (the same drug that gives them longevity prevents them from being fertile). In order to have a child, ex-vitro being the term, they have to apply to the regime in control, and be assessed by an assessor, hence the title.
Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) are the couple that want a baby, and Virginia (Alicia Vikander) is the assessor. She will make their lives a living hell for the next 7 days, under the guise of testing their suitability as parents.
She’s from The Government, you see, so everything she does must be for the greater good, surely?
The couple live near the ocean, in an incredibly expensive looking place. I guess not all apocalypses are equal. They seem to be doing okay, but I guess they’re bored, so they think a child will save their relationship.
Reference is often made to the “Old World”, as a terrible place where people are sent as a punishment or because they’re poor. Mia’s mother, we are told over and over, was exiled to the Old World to punish her presumably for telling the truth about something, like what a terrible regime is in power ruling over their lives with petty, persistent drudgery.
Probably fascist, probably voted for by a majority of voters, who knows. They probably campaigned on “We’ll make your lives a living hell, but at least we hate refugees more” and won in a landslide.
Mia is some variation on a botanist or biologist, and Aaryan designs virtual pets. You read right. Holographic ones, to replace all the living pets that the government destroyed. Both of them have contributed something valuable to the (remaining) world, hence that they even have the chance to procreate, but they still eat bugs in their meals, presumably because that’s all there is.
Virginia does basic interrogation type stuff that starts with tone policing or questioning their word choices like a schoolmarm trying to quiz a classroom of boys as to who’s been smoking. She knows everything about their lives and deploys info and people in order to make them freak out and potentially say something or do something that will disqualify them.
But then, randomly, she acts like a really annoying child in order to get them to roleplay as to how they would soothe a tantrum-bound child or deal with the messier stuff kids do.
It’s fucking infuriating, but they feel like they can’t do anything other than comply. Virginia, sensing their reluctance sometimes, insists that non-compliance will see them instantly fail the assessment.
At first, even when some of the shit she pulls seems reasonable, I was already thinking “maybe she’s not from The Government, maybe this is all bullshit”, but that doesn’t feel true, especially when they start getting deliveries of things the couple have to build (nightmarish IKEA torture stuff), or contacting the central couple’s previous partners and orchestrating mandated dinner parties that people are presumably obligated to attend or else.
It’s at this dinner party where, I think, Virginia gives the game away, just after Minnie Driver’s caustic character drops some truth bombs.
It’s past this point where, I feel, the film falls apart because of the flimsiness of the premise. They do enough with setting up that it’s a pretty grim world, but the crux of the whole flick, the purpose of the whole assessment process, is wasted. Not wasted potential, just waste.
There’s a reveal, but it’s not much of a revelation. It’s enough of a shoulder shrug to make you think Virginia was a fucking idiot, and The Regime in charge not only wasted the time of the characters in the flick, they wasted the audience’s time as well, which is quite an achievement for a fictional regime.
This is the kind of science fiction that people who don’t read science fiction or even like it aesthetically or intellectually, as a genre, produce. In their minds it’s more realistic or grounded, but really, it’s lazy stuff that wouldn’t even cut it as a lesser Black Mirror episode.
And if most Black Mirror episodes have an underlying theme, it’s that no matter the technological advances we make, humanity is doomed because of the terrible human capacity for cruelty or indifference.
If this flick has an underlying theme, it’s that… regimes are bad and lie to their citizens, and Virginia is a fucking idiot. Maybe it’s that people can delude themselves into believing anything, but even that’s a reach. These aren’t themes with universal applicability, or necessarily a theme that resonates with the general public.
It’s shot okay, that house looks amazing, there was probably nice music, most of the acting is fairly flat but that’s not out of tune with the feel of the flick, which is fairly muted. It’s just that, I paid nothing (extra) to watch this, since it turned up on Prime, so I streamed it in the luxury of my own lounge room last night, but good gods do I still feel ripped off.
2 hours of this nonsense, with no real payoff. I am aggrieved. I am very vexed.
5 times none of these people should be parents out of 10
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“I want to get to know the real you.” – always a bad idea - The Assessment
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