A popular but sarcastic response to the horrible behavior of someone else's children is a bit like this: you need a license to have a pet, but they will let someone have a child.
Bring the cinema of the conjecture. Taking this premise “and if” of the relevance of parents to an extreme dystopian is the elegantly bizarre if “evaluation”, with Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel, as a couple apparently perfect in the resolutely imperfect future, which finds their dream of parenting a possible reality if they could survive a week of testing. Observing in their ultra-modern seaside house is a severe woman named Virginia (an Alicia Vikander power), whose unruly evaluation method brings the well-intentioned MIA (Olsen) and Aaryan (patel) on the verge of personality disintegration.
Isn't rehearsal a good idea? Perhaps not in the artificial, sterile and bureaucratically created world created by the writers Dave Thomas and Nell Garfath-Cox (credited like Mme & M. Thomas) and John Connelly, and gave a palpable gravity by Fleurne, directing his first feature after having established a name in videoclips. And as with many filmmakers in transition to a long story after success with a flash the size of a bite, “evaluation” is a dominant piece of mood until our thirst for a deeper emotional and thematic resonance reveals its shortcomings.
A little mouth to feed is a privilege when there is little to eat, even if the revolutionary pharmaceuticals have enabled a few rich (and compliant) to survive on a planet ravoued by the climate, the resource scar and regulated by the population. Scientists Mia and Aaryan are not lazily sitting in their pocket in terms of the coast but with good taste of this world: it tries to solve lasting food problems in a dense greenhouse and it has a cavely dark and future-technical laboratory space in which it creates virtual animals (Gotta has the impression of the law of fur) to take off this forced mass. Responsible citizens who respect the rules should be parents, right?
Their mysterious evaluator, however, who plays the stages of childhood without suspicion where the borders are found, seems determined to disturb their prudent hope. Vikander, perhaps recognizing how entirely this type of role is, transforms Virginia into a disciplined tour de force of disciplined abandonment. The days offer challenges – handle a anger crisis, build a game house, organize a dinner (Minnie Driver excels by playing a particularly caustic guest) – who push the couple's buttons and force deeper questions not only on their union, but who they are inside and how they feel about what is posed to them.
The impassive humor and the psychological danger of all this are manipulated with a thorny finesse for a while, even if the darkness begins to settle on their desires and their dreams. Olsen records in particular the cracks in the veneer of an intelligent soul, good but interrogative with APLOMB. But when the film reaches an admirable capacity with its ideas on parenting, authoritarianism, mortality and connection, it weakens by bringing everything to the reverberant conclusion of its first trivial thirds.
Given the effectiveness of the film establishes its rules, the filmmakers choose to break one of its central and convincing puzzles trying to explain it in a badly written scene towards the end. The attempt to touch a favorite feels divorced from the nervous balance of the tones that Fortune had reached, helped largely by cool cinematography but in layers of Magnus Jonck, the conception of production of Jan Houllevigue and, of course, the delicious inscruitability in the threat of Vikander. She would make nightmares from Dr Benjamin Spock.
'The evaluation'
Class: R, for sexual content, language, suicide, sexual assault and brief nudity
Operating time: 1 hour, 54 minutes
Playing: In limited version on Friday March 21
