In “The Evaluation,” a psychological sci-fi thriller that premieres Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival, Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel play a couple who want to have children. The only problem? They live in a not-so-distant future where the state controls who gets to have a child. So they must pass a dark and mysterious test to prove they’re worthy.
Enter the evaluator (played by Alicia Vikander), who has come to assess the husband and wife in their home. Over the course of seven increasingly intense days, she asks them disturbing and uncomfortable questions before putting them through a simulation of the potential horrors that children could inflict on their parents. The final product strikes an unconventional, sometimes dark tone that deliberately veers into the absurd as the couple is forced to question why they wanted to expand their family in the first place. Director Fleur Fortuny wants the audience to feel “a sense of awkwardness” while watching the film. And so do her actors.
“Making people feel uncomfortable is really satisfying,” Olsen said at a press conference. Varieties Toronto Film Festival Studio Presented by J.Crew and SharkNinja. “We should all feel uncomfortable.”
Fortuny, who directed her feature film debut, “The Evaluation,” was inspired to make the film after her own struggle with fertility issues.
“I had been trying to have children for four years. I had to go through IVF and so many tests — it was kind of ridiculous,” she said. “At the time, a producer sent me a script. I felt really strongly about the idea of a future where you test a couple for a week to see if they can have children.”
Vikander, whose character was responsible for manufacturing the madness and cranking it up to 10, admits that while reading the script she wondered how some of the crazier scenes would go.
“I had to be very bold when I went on set. At a certain point, I had to let it be,” Vikander said. “The good thing is that you can get inspiration from your own life. I felt like I went on a journey of discovering myself at different ages, which is very interesting.”
“We can't help but play the truth. It is what it is. What we're going through is ridiculous, but we can't help but focus on being honest,” Patel added.
Since the film was shot in distant cities in Germany and Spain, the actors – who all met on the project – stayed in their locations on vacation days and bonded with each other during production.
In movies that are shot in remote locations, people on weekends [tend to] “They went into their own lives because they were tired or wanted to have that alone time,” Olsen said. “We just kept being drawn to each other. That doesn’t happen all the time. I found it incredibly comforting and special.”
“Evaluation” explores a world where having a child is not a given or even a decision that people make for themselves. Fortuny points to modern parallels with reproductive rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to end the constitutional right to abortion.
“It’s interesting because it’s close to what we see today in many countries. Not just in the United States but everywhere… the absurdity and paradox of wanting to control women’s bodies and people’s rights, but at the same time being selfish about our existence,” Fortuny said. “Because if you want children, you want them to have a great future — and we don’t work that way.”
