Who Gets to Be a Mother? The Chilling Cost of Reproduction in ‘The Assessment’

"The Assessment" as a high-concept film, uses a fairly conventional dystopian world-building premise:
Environmental degradation has made the dystopian world uninhabitable, forcing humans to live in protected domes. To cope with resource scarcity, society implements strict population control measures: using a drug named Senoxidine to extend life and suppress fertility, because natural reproduction is forbidden. Anyone wanting children must pass a government assessment to qualify and rely on artificial wombs to bear offspring. Dissidents are banished to the world outside the domes.

Mia, a botanist, and Will, a virtual pet designer, are a couple desperate to qualify for reproduction. They undergo a seven-day "assessment." The story begins here, dividing the film into 7 acts based on the assessment days. Alicia Vikander plays Vikander, the assessor, who transforms from an initially professional civil servant into a troublesome child after explaining the basic rules, challenging the couple's patience to test their qualifications as parents.

Mia (Elizabeth Olsen,), a botanist, and Aaryan (Himesh Patel), a virtual pet designer, are a couple desperate to qualify for reproduction. They undergo a seven-day assessment. The story begins here, dividing the film into seven acts based on the assessment days. Virginia (Alicia Vikander ), the assessor, transforms from an initially professional civil servant into a troublesome child after explaining the basic rules to challenge the couple's patience and test their qualifications as parents.

To be clear, this transformation doesn't mean she physically becomes a child. Rather, her appearance remains unchanged. The couple can only judge from her behavior and language that she is role-playing a child, and they must try to deal with her accordingly. Thanks to the brilliant performances of Vikander and Olsen, , audiences witness some of the breaking points in raising a child during these seven acts.

A child's presence inevitably brings major disruptions to the established order of life. Children can't eat or speak properly, shout randomly, and throw things around. When all this occurs in what was originally an artistically refined home with Mondrian-inspired stained glass windows, not only do the protagonists break down, but as a viewer, I felt irritated. It becomes especially absurd and unsettling when these childlike behaviors come from someone with an adult's appearance.

For me, raising children is an incredibly challenging task, sometimes even catastrophic. I don't have children myself, but I've witnessed countless women's lives transform after becoming mothers, which has made me fearful and led me to indefinitely postpone having children. I've since embraced the possibility of a childless life. I'm not ashamed to admit this fear and aversion. However, I must say that whenever I express such thoughts, I face varying degrees of social pressure. "Everyone should have children, because they're part of a happy life." This is arguably one of the most universal values. Hollywood also tends to cast a warm, soft glow over the process of raising children, as if to say: yes, this process might be a bit difficult, you'll spend lots of time accompanying children as they sleep, eat, and study, but these sacrifices are insignificant compared to what you'll gain. The challenges of parenting are just minor troubles and chaos in a grand mission. Just as "Modern Family" presents it, regardless of your gender, age, or skin color, having one or more children completes your life and gives you a true family. Ultimately, family is what defines happiness.

"The Assessment" doesn't overturn this value system. Instead, it builds on these values and creates a more extreme context by completing three layers of questioning and negation, gradually raising one important issue after another.

The first layer attempts to show the dark side and destructive nature of child-rearing: how it disrupts women's career development, disturbs life's order, and threatens marriages. And mothers bear the brunt of these risks. For instance, during the seven days, Aaryan's work is barely interrupted. Conversely, every time Mia tries to claim some time for herself, it triggers various troubles. When Virginia burns down Mia's greenhouse, Aaryan can still focus on his work. This dramatic scene vividly demonstrates how raising children destructively impacts the wife's work and life, but leaves the husband's career completely unaffected. Such stories frequently play out in my life. The concept of motherhood penalty has been discussed for years, yet society still hasn't prioritized solving it. Instead, the cost of increasing birth rates has been shifting onto women themselves: choose either career or family. This forces people like me, who're unwilling to sacrifice our work, to abandon plans for children. If you want both, you must endure an unspeakable extra burden. Last year's film "Nightbitch" starring Amy Adams also tried to raise this issue, but unfortunately, it didn't generate enough discussion.

As the story progresses, we see Mia's potential as a mother. Even after her life's work is destroyed, she still chooses to fulfill her maternal responsibility by rescuing Virginia from the flames. If someone like her doesn't qualify to be a mother, then who does? Why create artificial barriers to having and raising children? On the fourth day of the assessment, during a dinner party Mia and Aaryan had to organize, Evie's (Minnie Driver) words reveal the core reason for this predicament:

"you think because we are able to drink wine and grow crops in greenhouse and breed brats in bags, you've somehow conquered nature? You're wrong. It's borrowed. And anything you take from nature, sooner or later, she will want it back."

Here, the film raises its second important issue: the conflict between human rights and ecology. The contradiction between the ecological environment and human development has always been raised but never resolved. Just as humans cannot lift themselves by their own hair, they cannot oppose a system that maintains their own interests, even if this system and the said values will ultimately lead to human negatives in the long run. When freedom and creation are exalted to the point of no restraint, what awaits us might be the reclamation of freedoms, including the most natural right to reproduce – a basic human right. When we cannot assess the harm our current actions cause to the future world, we can only wait for the future world to assess our behavior in the present.

But having external authority control reproductive rights isn't the proper answer to solving reproductive issues. This is the third layer of questioning and negation: when an authoritarian regime controls reproduction, reproductive rights become a scarce social power monopolized by the privileged class.

By the story's end, we learn that the fertility assessment has become a means of deceiving and controlling the middle class; people can no longer afford more children while maintaining their current lifestyle. But to maintain social order and convince people of its fairness, the fertility assessment must exist. It makes people believe their inability to have children stems from their inadequacies as parents. The film doesn't extensively explore how this authoritarian mechanism operates, but when Mia visits the real Virginia after completing her assessment, Virginia's living conditions reveal a glimpse of life in this authoritarian dystopia.

Unlike Mia's spacious, artistic home that blends nature and technology, Virginia's living space is cramped, dark, and chaotic. While both have stained glass windows, Virginia's are haphazardly pieced together, clearly not pursuing Mondrian-style artistry. Virginia, in her oversized gray T-shirt, contrasts sharply with her previous professional image as an assessor. This is the truth of dystopian life – even civil servants exercising public power are themselves exploited by the system.

If everyone is suffering, why not rebel?

At the story's end, Mia ultimately chooses to return to the old world, back to where her mother is. Aaryan chooses to stay in the new world, satisfying his emotional needs through technological illusions. Virginia chooses to end it all, abandoning illusions and no longer colluding with the authoritarian system. These three choices perhaps represent the different attitudes people might take when facing adversity: escape, compromise, and self-termination. Women, or rather motherhood, becomes the representative of individual resistance against authoritarianism in this story. When Mia arrives in the old world and removes her mask for the first time, she sees something that brings her to tears. But what exactly does she see? We'll never find out; the film ends here.

I personally hope for a positive ending. Mia is a botanist who deals with and focuses on the relationship between humans and nature, treating each plant as an independent, interactive, and valuable individual. Aaryan is a scientist studying how to mimic natural life with artificial technology, and he indirectly participated in the government's previous extermination of human pets. The parting of their ways seems almost inevitable. And the film's true protagonist has always been just Mia.

Finally, Mia, representing humanity's yearning for maternal power, abandons the new world, while her husband, who's immortalized by technology, embarks on a mission of finding his wife and child in the new world. This old world, unlike the Mars world promised by Elon Musk, might be a devastated world, but the women represented by Mia choose to repair it rather than abandon it. She chooses to give up individual immortality for the possibility of creating new life. From a macro perspective, this maternal force is also key to maintaining ecological balance. Returning reproductive rights to mothers, trusting maternal instincts, rebuilding matriarchal civilization, and using this civilization to repair ecology might be the ideal answer to solving the ecological, reproductive, and ethical dilemmas faced by mankind.

Here, the film seems to touch on another issue: eco-feminism, or rather, the matriarchal theory.

I am someone who advocates for humans to treat reproduction more prudently (please don't see me as radical). We can see that after all countries reach developed status, birth rates decline. Humans have created more wealth, but resource distribution has become more unequal. Correspondingly, the deterioration of social and natural environments has led to a decline in the quality of life for humans and other living beings. A major reason many women refuse to have children isn't just to maintain enough energy to live their own lives, but also because they don't want their children to live in such an overly tense and high-pressure world. This is almost like women's maternal instinct manifesting as a response to human society: when the environment deteriorates, females tend to abandon or stop reproduction. Women's refusal to reproduce isn't because they hate life. On the contrary, it's precisely because they cherish life that they're more prudent about reproduction. And life encompasses not just humans, but also those species whose living spaces have been invaded by human development. Our use of technological and economic power for the endless expansion of human civilization's boundaries is, from an ecosystem perspective, a form of despicable cheating.

However, representatives of society's conservative forces, like some of the world's most powerful men (such as Musk and JD Vance), tirelessly shame and mock those women who give up having children but cause no harm to the world as pitiful "childless cat ladies," believing their ideas threaten human continuation. They believe humans should reproduce more for some fictitious collective grand goal, to rule the fictitious future world. Like Aaryan in the film, men will do anything just to become a more powerful father who can dominate more lives. They don't really care about life itself; they only care about themselves.

From a textual perspective, "The Assessment" is like a well-structured, consistent, and coherent debate. It raises issues and explores answers through different characters in different dimensions. Vodanker and Olsen's performances are very natural, vivid, and layered. They appear as both mothers and daughters. Their care for each other flows naturally through their subtle expressions and body language.

Worth mentioning is that this is actually director Fleur Fortune's debut work. From visual style to story pacing, she exhibits extraordinary talent throughout. The film's artistic design is extremely meticulous, featuring both Mondrian-style geometric compositions and Almodóvar-like vibrant colors. The claustrophobic feeling of interior scenes contrasts with the vastness of exterior scenes, further emphasizing the differences between the new and old worlds.

While this analysis mostly focuses on the film's textual aspects, its audiovisual language is also excellent. I strongly recommend you watch it yourself – whether as a childless woman or as a regular moviegoer, I believe you won't be disappointed.