"False Positive" reveals itself to be a bonkers, disturbing riff on "Rosemary's Baby"

False Positive (2021)

With chance-taking, firmly independent distributor A24 and against-type creatives behind and in front of the camera, one knows “False Positive” can’t just be a standard-issue potboiler. Initially, with Ilana Glazer co-writing the script with director John Lee (2016's "Pee-wee's Big Holiday") and starring, the film recalls a dead-serious Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig committing to the bit in 2015’s “…from Hell” thriller “A Deadly Adoption,” which seemed like a joke on all of us but did, in fact, air on Lifetime. As by-the-numbers as its general concept would seem, “False Positive” reveals itself to be anything but, flipping the joy of pregnancy into a woman’s paranoid nightmare, particularly when men in the medical field have a God complex. In using genre tropes to mine mommy-to-be anxiety, men controlling women’s bodies, and gaslighting, the film admirably goes to some uncomfortable places with overt shocks and disturbing insinuation.

Known best for co-creating and co-starring in the sharply funny Comedy Central series "Broad City," Ilana Glazer (2017’s “Rough Night”) goes straight with her hair and her performance as a married New Yorker named Lucy. Having done everything she's supposed to do, Lucy has tried for two years to get pregnant naturally with her husband Adrian (Justin Theroux), a reconstructive surgeon. Tired and frustrated, she agrees to an appointment with Adrian’s medical school professor, esteemed fertility specialist Dr. John Hindle (played by a charming yet sinister Pierce Brosnan). The doctor and his all-smiles nurses, including Dawn (a perfectly fake-cheery and condescending Gretchen Mol), are so positive and supportive that Lucy’s birth story seems all too good to be true. Once Hindle works his magic and the artificial insemination takes, Lucy is pregnant, an ultrasound revealing three embryos: twin boys and a girl. Complications then require the couple to make a decision when Hindle must perform a selective reduction; do they keep the two boys or the girl Lucy always wanted? For the next nine months, Lucy has a tough journey. Prepartum depression is normal, but could it be typical “mommy brain,” or is something more sinister going on here? Can Lucy confide in anyone?

Think an artificial-insemination riff on “Rosemary’s Baby" without the satanic panic, and you get "False Positive." It can’t be a coincidence, either, that Lucy’s husband is named Adrian, Satan’s son. There's no "tannis root" pendant for Lucy to wear, but Lucy is just as manipulated by everyone around her that she's like a prisoner in her own life, stripped of all agency until she takes it back. Earnest and then impressively raw, Ilana Glazer is completely up to the challenge in taking on the emotionally heightened labors and unraveling as Lucy. Though we are on Lucy's side, the script shrewdly doesn't let her off the hook entirely, either; her white privilege gets handed to her when she returns to the office of a spiritual midwife (Zainab Jab) as if she were Lucy's "mystical Negress." The rest of the cast—including Josh Hamilton, as Lucy’s casually sexist marketing boss, and Sophia Bush, as a fellow expectant mother—also plays the material for keeps, adding to Lucy's suspicion.

As "False Positive" opens, a bloodied Lucy walks the street after clearly being through the wringer, followed by an eerie, Tim Burton-esque score by Lucy Railton and Yair Elazar Glotman. Tracking back nine months earlier, what begins as pretty routine stuff without a hint of irony slowly becomes pulpier, more unsettling, and darkly provocative. The social commentary on bodily autonomy in a patriarchal system, blended with hallucinatory horror, isn’t subtle for a second, but that doesn't make it any less ballsy and effectively upsetting. An insane shift in tone is also drastic, and yet everything seems strange and almost intentionally stiff from the beginning anyway. Coupled with the ironically soothing voice of Marcia Henderson from the 1950 Broadway performance of “Peter Pan,” the final ten minutes where Lucy renews her womanhood are bonkers, twisted, satisfying, tragic, and grotesque all at once, or in one word, memorable. Excuse the poor bedside manner, but “False Positive” thrives as a fucked-up little movie.

Grade: B

A24 is releasing “False Positive” (92 min.) to Hulu on June 25, 2021.