From the premiere of Black Mirrorevery drama with a science fiction component about dehumanization in a technological contest is likely to be compared to the fiction of Charlie Brooker. And something like that, in some way unfair, happens with The evaluationfirst film by the French Fleur Fortune, which of course manifests the staging and the technical elements of the film superior to the average.
Drama and science fiction at the service of two actresses, Elizabeth Olsen y Alicia Vikander, The evaluation -To premieres in Spain in Prime Video– It shows a dystopian and authoritarian future, hyperconcience with climate change, where a couple undergoes strict evaluation to have a child. Naturally, we are facing a kind of psychological thriller, and the evaluator will subject truly hard evidence to the couple, turning the situation into something even darker than it appears.
If the shadow of Single white woman looking for He walks through his mind, they are not too wrong. As much as the indie and elaborate staging of Fortune, his film evokes in a futuristic key many of those domestic thrillers that abounded in the large screens of the eighties and ninety. And although The evaluation It is not entirely aware of it, that the film falls directly into that category and survives to count it is a virtue.
Both or more than on paternity and the set of artificial rules that seem to govern a world where everything is coded and controlled, The evaluation It extends that criticism, again perhaps without being at all, to a world of sustainable crops, artificial images and strict rules against a climate change conceived as an instrument of the fear and sword of Damocles thanks to, by the way, the outer phenomenal shot in Tenerife. In a way the film fantasizes with that sustainable discourse openly erected as a state control tool, identifying dissent with any element of political incorrectness, and that Hollywood turn is refreshing.
Although the premise ends before and the film extends too much, Fortune does a good exercise swinging the obvious black humor of the film without turning it into a comedy while, little by little, silently displaces the focus towards the evaluator Alicia Vikander. That The evaluation It seems more a variation of The orphan or a gender sample such as Collet-Serra’s that a film by Alex Garland or Spike Jonze is also a virtue, since the interesting thing is the duel of two good actresses (with vikander tune in the energy of his partner Michael Fassbender in Prometheus) more than in the undeniable claims of the director.
