‘The Assessment’ Review: Alicia Vikander Stars In Futuristic Story Where Government Will Decide If You Are Qualified To Have Kids, A Sci-Fi Premise All Too Plausible – Toronto Film Festival

deadline.com:

The press have been digging up old interviews with GOP Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance in which he suggests there should be a dividing line in society between those who have children, perhaps even giving those parents more than one vote, and those who don’t by suggesting they should be lesser in society.

That sounded like political absurdity to me, and then I saw The Assessment. Supposedly in the near future this “sci-fi” premise creates a world in which prospective parents must pass an initial test in order to prove their basic worth for having a child, and then endure a seven-day live-in visit from a facilitator known as the assessor who will put them through the ringer in all kinds of imaginable and unimaginable situations where at the end they will either get a passing grade — or not.

Sounds like the ideal job for Vance should he decide to switch careers. In the case of French director Fleur Fortune’s feature debut, it is Alicia Vikander as Virginia, the cold-as-ice, all-business assessor who wears a uniform of sorts and has her hair tightly wound in a bun to indicate this is a woman who will not be messed with.

She knocks on the door of the very sterile-looking modernistic home of Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel), a couple very much hoping to build a family and pass the government’s muster that they would be appropriate parents.