First-time feature director Fleur Fortuné comes to Toronto with a high-concept sci-fi of the old school. It’s a speculative and futurist contrivance that’s elegant, amusing, discomfiting and just the right side of preposterous. It’s an absurdist psychodrama of planned parenthood which mixes Brave New World with a little bit of Abigail’s Party.
The scene is a part of planet Earth salvaged or cordoned off from the rest of the world which was long ago destroyed by climate change. This fiercely protected and controlled new temperate zone is populated by the upper echelons of society. Criminals and undesirables are exiled to the ravaged and parched wasteland left behind: the “old world”. But the new-world elite must conform to the edicts of a blandly authoritarian government and one of the most important rules is that, due to finite resources, couples wanting children have to submit to an “assessment” of their relationship and babies have to be grown ex utero from the applicants’ genetic materials.
Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) are very important people: he is a scientist working in AI and she’s a plant biologist working on new organic energy sources. They are smoothly confident that their assessment will be successful. But the questioning is way beyond anything like, say, the adoption procedure of the old days; it will take seven days during which the assessor will actually live with the couple – and this is the deeply disturbing Virginia, sinuously played by Alicia Vikander.
Virginia is dressed with Mary Poppins correctness and speaks with the smiley enigmatic quality of the robot Vikander played in Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina. She asks intimate questions about their relationship and gives no hint of what the right answer might be. She insists on inspecting them having sex. (Are they doing it properly? Is this the right kind of caring lovemaking?) And then she brings in role play, and insists the couple host an excruciating dinner party with friends and family.
Her own behaviour becomes more erratic and infantile and inappropriate as she becomes a disturbed child who’s had a bad dream and wants to get into bed with mummy and daddy. Is this role play an accepted way of assessing their relationship? Should they be indulgent or strict? But that might not be what’s happening here. Is it rather that Virginia has had a massive work-related breakdown and now wishes merely to use her absolute power to destroy their relationship? Or is she perhaps daring them to assess her own intentions? And so Virginia carries on, as inscrutable, seductive and scary, perhaps, as Terence Stamp in Pasolini’s Teorema. The three leads deliver very watchable performances: each theatrical and self-aware in a different way, but coolly calibrated; and there are very entertaining supporting turns from Minnie Driver, Indira Varma and Charlotte Ritchie.
And the ultimate irony is that it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine a child existing in this emotionally cold and desolate world in any case (and that’s despite evidence that some couples are indeed successful in their applications). Children are just yearned-for ideas, aspirations that are there to smother memories of agonised relationships with their own parents. And also, perhaps, to smother memories of what’s happened to the planet. Opinions may divide about the extended coda that Fortuné gives her story but it is evidence that she is ambitious for something that eludes so many film-makers: an ending. It’s a stylish debut.
• The Assessment screened at the Toronto film festival.
