93 min | R | June 25, 2021 | A24
Lucy wants a baby, so she puts her body in the hands of a charming celebrity doctor and a husband who always takes his side. The pregnancy goes wrong, and every man in the room insists she is imagining it. The dread is real. The film just never decides what it is about.
Lucy Martin wants a baby. She and her husband Adrian go to a celebrity fertility doctor, conceive, and start a pregnancy that should be a dream. Then the dream curdles. False Positive is a horror film about medical paternalism and the way the system treats a pregnant woman as a vessel to be managed rather than a person to be heard. The real subject is gaslighting. Every man in Lucy’s life keeps telling her that her instincts are wrong and that she should be grateful.
Ilana Glazer plays Lucy as a woman watching her own certainty get explained away. She drops the comic register that made her famous and plays the role straight, with a tight smile that holds until it cannot. Pierce Brosnan plays Dr. John Hindle with a smooth bedside manner that reads as benevolence and functions as control. Justin Theroux plays Adrian as the husband who sides with the doctor over his wife and calls it reason. Zainab Jah grounds the film as Grace, the midwife Lucy is steered away from, and she carries the only warmth in the story.
John Lee directs from a script he wrote with Glazer and Alissa Nutting. The film leans on a cold clinical palette of whites and surgical blues that turns the doctor’s office into a place of dread before anything goes wrong. Lee stages the recurring dream imagery in blood reds that break the antiseptic look on purpose. The contrast is the point. The body horror works best when it is restrained and the camera lingers on a face instead of a wound.
The problem is the script wants to be more than it can sustain. False Positive borrows the architecture of Rosemary’s Baby and adds commentary on race and medicine and motherhood without finding a way to fuse the pieces. The ideas are sharp in isolation and muddy together. Glazer commits to the role and Lee builds real atmosphere. The film reaches for a thesis it never closes its hand around.