If Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale has left an imprint on your soul (haunting you with visions of red cloaks, stolen children, and a society twisted by theocratic control), then The Assessment will likely crawl right under your skin and stay there.
Directed with unnerving precision and set in a dystopian near-future, this Magnolia Pictures sci-fi thriller reimagines the struggle for reproductive autonomy not just as policy, but as performance.
With Elizabeth Olsen (WandaVision) and Himesh Patel (Station Eleven) as a couple evaluated by a government official (Alicia Vikander) for their parental “suitability,” the film has psychological horror with societal critique in a way that The Handmaid’s Tale fans will find disturbingly familiar.
Where The Handmaid’s Tale gave us Gilead (a religiously extremist regime using scripture to justify the systemic subjugation of women), The Assessment asks: What happens when motherhood becomes a state-sanctioned role you have to audition for?
Like The Handmaid’s Tale‘s June Osborne, Olsen’s Mia begins as a woman trying to survive in a world built on broken systems, only to find her autonomy slowly stripped away by surveillance, absurd expectations, and the kind of compliance that feels eerily close to our reality.
The Assessment is the sci-fi mirror that The Handmaid’s Tale fans have been waiting for
In The Handmaid’s Tale, June’s trauma is catalyzed by a government that reduces women to their reproductive capabilities. The Assessment updates this narrative with a sci-fi lens.
Here, motherhood is not required. But it is VERY conditional. It has to be worked for, measured, and done. How far would you go to give birth? This question strikes just as forcefully in 2025 as Atwood’s did in 1985.
What makes The Assessment uniquely disturbing is how quietly it unfolds. There’s no Gilead, no Aunt Lydia, no public executions. Just a cold home in a quiet future, and a stranger (Vikander) who slowly destabilizes Mia and Aaryan’s relationship under the guise of “evaluation.”
Her remarkably intrusive methods (watching them have sex, acting like a toddler, demanding the primary bedroom) aren’t far from the psychological tactics used in Gilead’s Red Center.
But instead of punishment, there’s manipulation. Instead of handmaids, there are “applicants.” It’s surveillance dressed up as care, control disguised as compassion.
Elizabeth Olsen’s masterclass in subtle resistance
Fans of Elizabeth Moss’s portrayal of June Osborne will find themselves equally captivated by Olsen’s restrained yet raw depiction of Mia.
While June fights back with fury and fire, Mia deals with her erasure with quiet resilience. Her greenhouse becomes a metaphorical womb…one she tries to keep alive in a dying world. Vikander, meanwhile, channels the same icy calm of Aunt Lydia, but with some added unhinged unpredictability.
Himesh Patel’s Aaryan is the counterbalance: steadfast, tender, and increasingly terrified. Their bond is intimate and unsettling, especially as the “Assessment” turns more surreal. The film offers no easy answers, only ethical provocations.
Are you “good enough” to be a parent? And who gets to decide?
