False Positive is a horror fantasy about pregnancy, or rather, the way a certain kind of affluent woman gets pregnant. The two main elements of that shot - Glazer’s stunned face and a big shmear of red ooze - are the centerpieces of the movie’s best scenes. The sections that do work are mostly predicted there in that first image. Glazer and Lee’s script scatters its thematic attention in the last third, which ruptures the movie’s attempt to build dread, and director Lee creates a thin, under-realized world. Despite this promising set of influences, though, False Positive fails to cohere. Also, Lucy’s obsessed with Peter Pan, and she wants to name her baby Wendy, so our minds quickly turn to all the ways children can be lost. There’s a little Carrie mixed in, and Medea, and, for the really scary details, real life. There are echoes of Rosemary’s Baby here - again there’s a cabal, or a delusion of a cabal, making Lucy’s pregnancy happen. Having a uterus can already be such a goddamned horror show how can you tell when you’re being paranoid? Lucy’s agency and sanity slip away. The men might be gaslighting her - or simply patronizing her. People keep telling her not to worry in the middle of the biggest event of her life. The people in her life, including a new friend played by Sophia Bush, laugh at Lucy about “mommy brain,” dismissing her instincts that something somewhere has gone horribly wrong. These two older guys pooh-pooh all Lucy’s worries about IVF with sympathy and confidence, in much the same way her boss Greg (Josh Hamilton) talks supportively about her pregnancy - even as he takes away her marketing campaign. Glazer plays Lucy, a young woman hoping for a child a lightly grizzled Justin Theroux plays her husband Adrian, who wants her to visit his mentor, the superstar obstetrician Dr. Which one will be the monster? The movie hints that, in some way … they all are. I won’t say whose blood is on her face, yet at various points in the movie, some seemingly feminist guy - a boss, a husband, a doctor - will let his pretense slip. In her exhaustion, she looks like every thriller’s final girl, but Glazer hasn’t fought her way past zombies or a serial killer. Her face is a mask of blood police lights flicker against her gore-spattered shirt. We are clearly witnessing the end of something awful: Glazer staggers down a New York street. The first image of John Lee and Ilana Glazer’s fertility horror film False Positive is a flash-forward.
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December 2022
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