Reseñas de la crítica

The first feature from the longtime music video director has a ton of style, and signals from the beginning her confident use of framing, texture and color.

The deadpan humor and psychological peril of it all is handled with prickly finesse for a good while... 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.

Prioritizing aesthetics over narrative, the film offers only superficial hints of a society riven by class and authoritarian politics: The wealthy enjoy artificially extended life spans beneath an invisible dome, while the rest inhabit an “old world” of deprivation and disease. Consequently, “The Assessment” — much like a brutally honest centenarian (an awesome Minnie Driver) whom Virginia invites to dinner — is much easier to respect than to love.

Regardless of whether The Assessment bit off more than it could chew, I did still enjoy it. The themes are sound, if also somewhat overt... The production design is amazing. And performances engage throughout. The tone can get too jokey for its own good regarding subject matter, but I didn’t necessarily hate it.

If it’s ultimately another film about acting, The Assessment manages to evade meta-cinematic self-absorption by broadening the idea of performance to encompass simulation.

The Assessment is an impressive debut from Fortune who brings a career best performance out of Vikander, and although the film’s script loses momentum, it’s sure to spark conversations surrounding a future with limited resources.

Fleur Fortuné masterfully creates universal scenarios that induce tension, and then she cranks up the volume... There is no denying the film is a twisted form of therapy and trauma exercise and a surprising climate change warning. It perfectly captures the pure chaos and sacrifice of parenting. The Assessment is a horrifying power trip.

[E]ven when “The Assessment” goes beyond its smaller scale, it has a lot on its mind throughout and Fortuné ably balances the cerebral with the emotional. The film may depict a society losing touch with humanity, but is unusually affecting when it shows no lack of it of its own.

Exploring a dystopian future in which couples must prove themselves worthy of being parents, The Assessment is an intriguing premise in search of a more successful execution.

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.

At its best, The Assessment smartly taps into and maintains its focus on the near universal anxiety about parenting in a world made increasingly uninhabitable by overconsumption and climate change. But the film loses its way when it widens its scope and tries to incorporate eleventh-hour world-building.

Fortuné and screenwriters John Donnelly and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas have crafted a compelling genre thriller that manages to build a world that feels both genuinely new and depressingly realistic if human society goes too far down the wrong path.