Fluer Fortuné’s The Assessment (2024) serves as a compelling companion piece to Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, with both films set in a near-future world where childbirth has become a rarity. Yet, amid this crisis, their characters cling to the fragile hope of new life. While Cuarón’s vision is rooted in a gritty, war-torn landscape populated by working-class struggles, Fortuné’s film shifts the lens to a more insular perspective—that of a privileged couple living in a secluded, state-sanctioned sanctuary.
Despite the serene setting, The Assessment delivers a sharp critique of societal control, personal autonomy, and the quiet tyranny of privilege. It unfolds as a thoughtful meditation on what it truly means to become a parent in a world governed by surveillance and sterile order. The film isn’t afraid to venture into philosophical territory, raising questions that linger long after the credits roll.
Ultimately, the story drives its three central characters to a pivotal crossroads, forcing them to confront uncomfortable truths and make irreversible choices. What follows is a detailed summary of the film—and a deeper look into its quietly haunting conclusion.
Spoilers Ahead
The Assessment (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
“The Assessment” is an English-language sci-fi thriller film, which serves as the directorial debut of Fleur Fortuné. The script, written by Nell Gargarth-Cox, John Donnelly, and Dave Thomas, examines humanity’s fate at a near-distant period when people are allowed to have babies only under certain conditions.
What happens in Elizabeth Olsen’s ‘The Assessment’?
The film takes place in a world where ecological crises have ravaged the world, and the habitable remains are left only for a select few. Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel), a married couple, are a part of this exclusive group and have more freedom than the rest left in the Old World. Unlike the couple, the Old World dwellers are stuck in a wasteland since they protested against the authorities ahead of the partition. Although freer than them, Mia and Aaryan face the ripple effects of the authoritative pressures.
In their world, childbirth has been regulated. The New World residents can have a child only if they pass an assessment test. Virginia (Alicia Vikander) is an assessor, a government employee appointed to check people’s eligibility to raise a child. One day, she shows up at Mia and Aaryan’s house with a mandated plan. She is required to stay with them to closely monitor their behavior and note down her observations for seven days. At the end of the week, she is supposed to share her diagnosis like a bureaucratic employee. That will decide whether the couple is suitable as parents.
What happens during Mia and Aaryan’s assessment test?
Virginia does not share any specifics about the test before Mia and Aaryan agree to undergo it. She reveals that it is part of her procedure to keep them in the dark so that they can be honest and their actions are not premeditated. From the get-go, she tests the strength of their relationship. As Aaryan starts talking about his virtual reality experiments, Virginia interjects to ask Mia about her passion. Mia shows her botanical garden filled with cultivated plants of all kinds. She ensures that they receive a suitable and protective environment.
Virginia becomes both a passive and an active participant in the couple’s lives. She does not let them have even a single moment of privacy and stays by the door even when they decide to have sex. Soon, she behaves like a child and throws tantrums to check how the couple behaves in such situations. Later, she invites their friends and past colleagues with whom they barely get along. One of them is Walter (Nicholas Pinnock), Mia’s former senior, who groomed her into being her sexual partner. Another one is Serena (Charlotte Ritchie), with whom Aaryan once tried to have a child.
During the dinner, Mia and Aaryan expose things about their pasts, which sour the overall mood. They realize that Virginia is trying to provoke them to reveal their unpleasant sides. However, they find some of Virginia’s behavior particularly odd and wonder how it can be part of her assessment process.
The Assessment (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
How does Virginia affect Mia and Aaryan’s relationship?
Virginia creates a fertile ground for conflict between Mia and Aaryan. In the beginning, it feels like it’s just a part of her assessment to see if the couple can handle a child’s tantrums. Soon, it gets stranger as she tries to kiss Mia on her lips and make her leave home for a fake medical emergency. When Mia goes away, Virginia makes a move on Aaryan. She misleads him to believe that he should give in to his urges to get a positive assessment. Throughout her overall process, she switches between behaving like a child and an adult.
One day, while playing on the beach, Virginia goes missing. Mia goes to save her, worried she is drowning. That upsets Virginia, who claims that she is pretending to be a starfish. Aaryan discounts Virginia’s behavior for being childlike, which then upsets Mia. Soon, Mia notices Aaryan and Virginia playing together in his lab and gets envious of their growing bond. She leaves to spend some time by herself. While unsupervised, Virginia locks herself inside Mia’s botanical garden and nearly chokes herself to death. Mia saves her, but Aaryan refuses to help her in doing so.
Does Virginia give Mia and Aaryan a positive assessment?
After surviving a near-death experience, Virginia offers her assessment. She reveals that Mia and Aaryan cannot have a child. The couple gets angry, considering all that they had been through during the week. Aaryan blurts out that he slept with Virginia. It leads the couple down a rabbit hole, but there are also his other perverse inclinations. He justifies it by saying that Virginia forced him into it, but it’s too late to salvage the situation. The negative assessment ruins their marriage beyond repair. It makes Mia reanalyze her life goals. She also lost the garden she cultivated with a lot of hard work.
What is Virginia’s ulterior motive behind the assessment?
After losing her life’s work, Mia locates Virginia’s cramped apartment. She meets her to question why they received a negative assessment. Virginia reveals a darker truth behind the program. For over six years, no couple has received a positive assessment. So, Mia and Aaryan were most likely not going to get one either. Unlike many other assessors, who left their jobs due to fatigue, Virginia kept working with the hope that she would get a child in exchange for her service. However, after Mia’s confrontation, she admits that she may never get it either.
The system is inherently designed to fail all their hopes but keep them in a perpetual cycle of desire. It benefits from their anguish while making them live soulless lives. The same system affects Virginia, who is fatigued herself. So, the botanical garden incident might be her way to relieve herself from that pain. It also hints at her possible trauma as a mother and a daughter, of losing her loved ones in the Old World. Her erratic behavior might be her way of making Mia and Aaryan get used to the futility of their noble actions by directing the blame on their mutual differences rather than external factors.
What is the fate of Virginia, Mia, and Aaryan?
Toward the end of the film, Virginia visits a young couple who’s hoping to have a child. By then, she might be too tired to break their hopes or manipulate their emotions. So, while she is alone, she jumps off their balcony and takes her life. As it happens, Mia crosses the border of the New World to enter the Old World, hoping to get closer to her mother, who was put there for protesting against the tyrannical system. Back home, Aaryan is seen playing with a young girl while Mia stands in the distance. The girl and Mia are presumably virtual reality models that he created to meet his goals.
The Assessment (2024) Movie Themes Analyzed
Human Connection
A common thread between all the characters is their yearning for a human connection, often resulting from their conflicted past. It drives their innate desire to have a child. When that doesn’t seem to happen, Mia leaves to reconnect with her estranged mother. On the other hand, Aaryan presumably uses his knowledge to fill his emotional void. Earlier, he designed a virtual baby, which Mia did not approve of because it smelled of nothing. With this subtextual layer, the film begs us to question what we consider a human connection and whether it depends on someone’s physical presence, emotional reciprocation, or sensory experience.
Personal Liberty and Mortality
The characters live in an oppressive system designed to provide for a few with the available resources. So, even a personal choice of childbirth becomes an authority’s concern. It is not enough for people to want to have children. They also have to prove their compatibility and trustworthiness as parents. What initially seems like a modest ask for an emotionally supportive environment ultimately reveals itself to be part of an endless loop, where such desires will potentially never be met.
It also ties in with the discussion during dinner where a 150+-year-old invitee offers a bleak perspective on this situation: In exchange for a person being brought into the world, one of them should sacrifice themselves. However, that seems unlikely in a world that has seemingly cracked the code of immortality. So, the desire to have a child can simultaneously feel selfless and cruel. The lack of say in any of her life’s matters leads Mia to abandon her idyllic life and head to the Old World. She may not survive there, but it will at least offer her the mental peace that she is not giving in to the whims of the oppressive system and is in charge of her choices.
Class and Privilege
Mia, Aaryan, and their friends happen to be a part of a privileged class, unlike Virginia or the Old World dwellers. They pride themselves on their past achievements and see their present situation as a reflection of the same. They also consider themselves worthy of a child-bearing privilege that others may not even get a chance to get assessed for. The class discrepancy shows its head, especially when Mia visits Virginia at her apartment. It is far smaller and darker than her home.
During this visit, Mia introduces the topic of their worth for such a privilege. Since she and Aaryan have had planet-saving inventions, she believes they are more worthy than Virginia, who is part of a system that exploits people’s emotions. However, Virginia is oppressed herself. She is a cog in a machine, unable to make any choice for herself, and is stuck in a near-delusional cycle toward her parenting goal.
