The Assessment 2024 Review: What If Becoming a Parent Meant Passing a Test?

How far would you go to be a parent in a world that controls every breath you take?

What makes someone worthy of becoming a parent? The Assessment doesn’t offer an answer—it dares you to sit in that uncomfortable silence, to squirm in the tension of watching two people unravel under a microscope, stripped of privacy and forced to prove their love in the most unnatural of circumstances. It's chilling, disorienting, and disturbingly relevant.

Set in a not-so-distant future where climate collapse has left the Earth scorched and sterile, The Assessment imagines a world where childbirth is a privilege, not a right. It’s a future designed around survival and strict government control. Even parenting requires state approval. You want a child? First, you’ll need to be assessed—seven days of intense observation by a government official, who watches how you eat, sleep, argue, and cope. It’s Big Brother disguised as Child Services.

For Mia (Elizabeth Olsen), a botanist clinging to the hope of regrowing life, and Aaryan (Himesh Patel), a VR pet developer clinging to synthetic comfort, the assessment represents their last shot at family. They're assigned Virginia (Alicia Vikander), a government assessor whose calm exterior hides something far more unsettling. She doesn’t just observe—she inserts herself into their lives, pretending to be their child, throwing tantrums, asking loaded questions, testing patience, love, and limits. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she begins to manipulate them. And then, everything unravels.

What begins as a futuristic bureaucratic process transforms into a psychological siege.

Himesh Patel as Arayan and Elizabeth Olsen as Mia

The Disintegration of Hope

From the moment Virginia steps through their door, there's a subtle shift in tone. The sterile dome they call home—high-tech, air-regulated, synthetic—is a perfect metaphor for the couple’s relationship: controlled, performative, built on projections of what a family “should” look like. Virginia doesn’t just test their parenting abilities; she slowly chips away at their delusions, their facades, their togetherness.

There’s a particularly disturbing scene where Virginia invites guests for a dinner party. What should be a night of community turns into social warfare. Every conversation is laced with judgment. Every laugh feels forced. The couple, once confident and composed, begins to falter. The mask slips.

And then comes the film’s most gut-wrenching turn: while Mia is lured away under false pretences, Virginia assaults Aaryan, claiming it's part of the process. It’s an unflinching moment—not just in its violence, but in how Aaryan responds. He rationalises, compartmentalises, and when Mia returns, broken and betrayed, we’re reminded how often people normalise trauma when they're desperate to pass, to belong, to win.

Alica Vikander as Virgina, The Assessor

The Ghosts We Carry Into Parenthood

Mia’s arc is the film’s emotional core. Her desire to be a mother is entangled with fears of becoming like her own. Her mother was exiled for rebelling against the system—a detail that lingers like smoke throughout the film. Is motherhood an inheritance? A performance? Or something deeper? As the assessment drags on, Mia begins to see herself not just as a potential parent, but as a child still shaped by her past. She watches her relationship decay in real time, her greenhouse torched, her trust in Aaryan reduced to ashes. And still, she clings to her dignity.

The final confrontation between Mia and Virginia is unforgettable. Virginia confesses that no one has passed the assessment in years. That her role is not to find good parents, but to give people a flicker of hope before extinguishing it. In a final twist, she was promised a child of her own in return for her compliance. A broken system creating broken people.

Virginia’s suicide days later is quiet. A final refusal. A surrender. Or maybe, a protest.

Simulated Love in a Real World

In the closing scenes, Aaryan creates simulated versions of Mia and a growing digital child, locking himself in a synthetic fantasy. It’s haunting, especially because it feels plausible. After everything, he chooses control over chaos, the known over the unknown. But Mia chooses something else—she leaves. Back to the Old World. Back to her mother’s roots. To risk. To resistance. To something real.

The Assessment doesn’t wrap up neatly. And it shouldn’t. It’s not a film about answers; it’s a film about questions we’re too scared to ask. What are the costs of control? Can love survive surveillance? And most uncomfortably: who gets to decide who’s worthy of parenthood?

Final Thoughts

This isn’t an easy watch. It crawls under your skin, dragging your empathy in directions you didn’t expect. The performances are phenomenal—Olsen is raw, Vikander is quietly terrifying, and Patel captures a man torn between logic and longing. The pacing is methodical, the cinematography sterile yet claustrophobic, and the score hums with unease. It feels more like theatre than cinema—intimate, suffocating, inescapable.

The Assessment isn’t science fiction. Not really. It’s a psychological horror dressed as domestic drama. A mirror to our obsession with perfection. A warning of where we’re headed if we let systems dictate our humanity.

So ask yourself: if someone came into your home and asked you to prove your worth—your patience, your past, your partnership—could you pass?

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Behind the Scenes: Fleur Fortune's Personal Assessment

Fleur Fortuné’s debut feature, The Assessment, isn’t just a chilling dystopian drama—it’s a deeply personal piece of storytelling shaped by her own journey through IVF. While developing the film, Fortuné was undergoing fertility treatments herself. The emotional weight of invasive procedures, waiting rooms, and the quiet heartbreak of uncertainty became more than background noise; it seeped into every frame of the story she was building. This wasn’t just science fiction. It was a reflection.

In her interviews, Fortuné has spoken with quiet honesty about how her experience of being assessed by doctors, by the system, even by society, paralleled the emotional reality of her characters. She understood the quiet devastation of being asked to “prove” your worthiness to become a parent. That connection shifted her focus away from the typical trappings of speculative cinema. Instead, she dug deeper into character, into discomfort, into what it means to be emotionally exposed under the guise of progress.

She spent five years shaping the script with screenwriter John Donnelly, making sure the emotional arcs weren’t just plausible—they were lived-in. The film’s stark setting, isolated and clinical, mirrors the mental and emotional isolation many people experience in fertility journeys. Fortuné wanted audiences to feel that—how sterile environments can make the most human experiences feel distant and detached.

For filmmakers, The Assessment is more than a debut—it’s a masterclass in bringing your truth to the screen. Fortuné’s vulnerability becomes the film’s superpower. Instead of leaning on spectacle, she leaned on something harder to fake: emotional honesty. And it shows. Her film is a reminder that the best sci-fi doesn’t just imagine the future—it holds a mirror to the most human parts of us right now.