In “The Assessment,” a psychological sci-fi thriller that premieres on Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival, Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel play a couple that wants to procreate. The only problem? They live in the not-so-distant future where the state controls who gets to have a child. So, they have to endure a shadowy and mysterious test to prove they are worthy.
Enter the assessor (played by Alicia Vikander), who comes to evaluate the husband and wife in their home. Over the course of seven increasingly intense days, she asks them invasive and uncomfortable questions before putting them through simulations of potential horrors that children can inflict on their parents. The final product strikes an offbeat and sometimes dark tone that intentionally veers into absurdity as the duo is forced to question why they want to grow their family in the first place. Director Fleur Fortuné wants audiences to feel “kind of awkward” while they’re watching the film. Her actors do, too.
“Making people feel uncomfortable is really gratifying,” Olsen said at Variety’s Toronto Film Festival studio presented by J.Crew and SharkNinja. “We should all be uncomfortable.”
Fortuné, who directed “The Assessment” in her feature debut, was inspired to make the film after her own struggles with fertility.
“I was in the process of trying to have kids for four years. I had to go through IVF and lots of tests — to the point where it was kind of absurd,” she said. “That’s when a producer sent me a script. I felt pretty deeply about the idea of a future where you’d test a couple for a week to decide if they can have kids.”
Vikander, whose character is responsible for manufacturing the insanity and ratcheting it up to 10, admits she wondered while reading the script how some of the zanier scenes would play out.
“I had to be quite fearless stepping on set. At a certain point, I just had to let go,” Vikander said. “The good thing is that you can get inspiration from your own life. I felt like I got to go through a journey of discovering myself in different ages, which was very interesting.”
Patel added, “We can only play the truth of it. It is what it is. It is absurd what we’re going through, but we can only focus on being truthful.”
Since the movie was filmed in far-flung cities in Germany and Spain, the cast — all of whom met on this project — stayed put on days off and bonded during the production.
“On films where you shoot in remote locations, people on the weekends [tend to] go off to their private lives because they’re exhausted or want that time alone,” Olsen said. “We just kept gravitating towards one another. It doesn’t happen all the time. I found it was incredibly comforting and special.”
“The Assessment” explores a world where having a child is not a given or even a decision that people get to make themselves. Fortuné notes the modern parallels of reproductive rights in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to end the constitution right to abortion.
“It’s quite interesting because it’s close to what we see today in many countries. Not only U.S. but everywhere… the absurdity and paradox of wanting to control a woman’s body and people’s rights, but at the same time being selfish about our own existence,” Fortuné said. “Because if you want kids, you want them to have a great future — and we are not working that way.”
