‘The Assessment’ review: A nightmarish test for parenthood

A popular if snarky response to the horrible behavior of someone else’s kids goes a little like this: You need a license to own a pet, but they’ll let anybody have a child.

Bring on the cinema of conjecture. Taking that “what if” premise of state-mandated parental suitability to a dystopian extreme is the elegantly oddball if undercooked “The Assessment,” starring Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel as a seemingly perfect couple in a decidedly imperfect future, who find their dream of parenthood a possible reality if they can survive a week of testing. Doing the observing in their ultra-modern seaside home is a severe-looking woman named Virginia (a powerhouse Alicia Vikander), whose unorthodox method of evaluation brings the well-intentioned Mia (Olsen) and Aaryan (Patel) to the brink of personality disintegration.

Isn’t rehearsing a good idea? Perhaps not in the artificial, sterile and bureaucratically ordered world created by screenwriters Dave Thomas and Nell Garfath-Cox (credited as Mrs. & Mr. Thomas) and John Connelly, and given palpable gravity by Fleur Fortuné, directing her first feature after establishing a name in music videos. And as with a lot of filmmakers transitioning to long-form narrative after success with bite-sized flash, “The Assessment” is a commanding mood piece until our thirst for deeper emotional and thematic resonance reveals its shortcomings.

A little mouth to feed is a privilege when there’s little left to feed on, even if groundbreaking pharmaceuticals have allowed a wealthy (and compliant) few to survive on a climate-ravaged, resource-scarce and population-regulated planet. Scientists Mia and Aaryan aren’t sitting idly in their coastally remote but achingly tasteful pocket of this world: She’s trying to solve sustainable food problems in a dense greenhouse and he’s got a cavernously dark, future-tech lab space wherein he’s creating virtual pets (gotta get the feel of the fur right) to offset that enforced mass culling of animals years ago. Responsible citizens who play by the rules should get to be parents, no?

Their mysterious assessor, however, who play-acts stages of childhood without a hint of where the borders lie, seems intent on disrupting their cautious hope. Vikander, perhaps recognizing how tantalizingly different this type of role is for her, turns Virginia into an unsettling tour de force of disciplined abandon. The days offer up challenges — handling a tantrum, building a playhouse, hosting a dinner (Minnie Driver excels playing an especially caustic guest) — that push the couple’s buttons and force deeper questions about not only their union but who they are inside and how they feel about what’s being asked of them.

The deadpan humor and psychological peril of it all is handled with prickly finesse for a good while, even as the darkness begins to set in on their desires and dreams. Olsen in particular registers the cracks in the veneer of a smart, good yet questioning soul with aplomb. But when the movie reaches an admirable capacity with its ideas about parenthood, authoritarianism, mortality and connection, it falters in bringing everything to the reverberating conclusion its discomfiting first two-thirds merits.

Considering how efficiently the movie sets up its rules, the filmmakers opt to shatter one of its central, compelling enigmas by attempting to explain it in a poorly written scene toward the end. The attempt at a heart-tugging twist feels divorced from the nervy balance of tones that Fortuné had achieved, helped in no small part by the cool yet layered cinematography of Magnus Jonck, Jan Houllevigue’s production design and, of course, the delicious inscrutability in Vikander’s playdate menace. She’d give Dr. Benjamin Spock nightmares.