Magnolia Pictures has released a trailer for The Assessment, a film starring Elizabeth Olsen (WandaVision), Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina), and Himesh Patel (Station Eleven) in a dystopian retrofuture where anyone who wants to give birth to a child has to go through a rigorous seven-day test.
The trailer released today suggests the film has an off-kilter tone, where Vikander’s assessor gets progressively bonkers, at times acting literally like a two-year-old that Olsen and Patel’s characters have to take of.
Here’s the full synopsis of the film, to give you more insight on what The Assessment is about:
The Assessment follows Mia (Olsen) and Aaryan (Patel), a successful couple who hope to become parents in a near future where resources are extremely limited and the government keeps firm control over reproduction. They are assigned an assessor named Virginia (Vikander), who moves into their home for seven days to evaluate whether they deserve to move forward in their parenting journey. What Mia and Aaryan are hoping is a routine test quickly unravels into a psychological nightmare, forcing them to question the very foundations of their society and what it truly means to be human.
The film comes from director Fleur Fortuné, who saw the script by Nell Garfath Cox and Dave Thomas and connected to it, in no small part because of her personal fertility struggles. “For me, it all came back to that same question I was asking myself: why do they want a child?” she said in a director’s statement.
She later added, “I didn’t want the film to be a debate about whether women should or shouldn’t have children—there are already plenty of people with opinions on what women should or shouldn’t do with their bodies. Instead, I found it more interesting to challenge people with the selfishness and absurdity of the decisions our society makes today, trying to control our bodies while clinging to the freedom to destroy the planet and their future.”
In addition to Olsen, Patel, and Vikander, The Assessment stars Minnie Driver, Indira Varma, Nicholas Pinnock, Charlotte Ritchie, and Leah Harvey.
The film premieres in theaters on March 21, 2025. Check out the trailer below.
