False Positive premiered yesterday on Hulu. Here are my thoughts. Spoilers ahead!
When the first trailer for False Positive dropped several weeks ago, I could barely contain my excitement. The cool girl from “Broad City” in a Rosemary’s Baby-esque thriller? Sign me up with a star next to my name!
One thing that I’ve loved about this pandemic is the flexibility and open-mindedness film studios have shared with regards to their releases. They seem more than willing to release their films through streaming services like Hulu or HBOMax, rather than push back release dates in hopes of getting more out of a traditional “now in theatres” release. This is a praise of A24 and a direct attack on Disney and Universal. Come on, guys. You know I love you. I’ll dedicate my heart and soul to you regardless, but just give me Black Widow and Jurassic World: Dominion already!
I digress. Essentially, nothing stopped me from seeing False Positive on opening night.
An hour and a half later, I flocked to the internet to read the feedback people had for every aspect of the movie. And you know what? I was sorely disappointed.
Sure, the movie had it’s several online reviews through published outlets, but Reddit seemed, forgive the pun, barren, with opinions and thoughts. You know what it had PLENTY of, though? Posts of Ilana Glazer’s breasts during her several nude scenes. Commencing eye roll sequence.
As a result, since the internet seems to be taking its sweet time to discuss, I’m going to take the initiative and jump into debate and discourse. Controversial opinions and honest takes await!
This is the part where I tell you: if you haven’t seen it yet (and you want to) and you’re still reading, come back later.
FALSE POSITIVE: THE CASTING
Inject “comedic actors doing serious roles” into my veins, please. It brings me such joy to see funny people stretch their dramatic muscles. Glazer plays sweet but spiraling Lucy so well. Her elusive grip on reality as she gets torn between gaslit vs. “mommy brain” is beyond captivating.
Here’s my “his name is literally Darth Father” moment when it comes to casting: Justin Theroux. MAKE NO MISTAKE: he is talented and brings it every time I see him. However, almost every time I’ve seen him, he’s creepy, manipulative, selfish, or some combination of the three! Casting him in this role made me suspicious of his character from the beginning. On the other hand, that may have been the point. I hope he’s a genuinely nice guy in real life, because he does a great job of making me hate him, especially as Adrian, Lucy’s successful and charming surgeon husband.
Speaking of “I hate you,” let’s talk about Pierce Brosnan. Only James Bond himself could be equal parts charming and loathsome. His depiction of Dr. Hindle reminds me of Christian Bale’s description of his inspiration for American Psycho (which, coincidentally, featured Justin Theroux!): he’s smiling, but there’s nothing light behind his eyes. No one else sees it but Lucy (and, of course, the audience), and that’s what makes it so terrifying.
Dr. Hindle is perpetually surrounded by two petite blonde nurses, Dawn and Rita. Their smiles are artificial and do nothing to disarm. They assist Dr. Hindle in telling Lucy that she is fine, nothing is wrong, and that her concerns are irrational. This brings me to my final casting note: Sophia Bush.
Where these nurses are fake-happy, Sophia’s character Corgan seems genuine. Her “mommy glow” makes her seem genuinely warm and well intended. It makes perfect sense that when looking for friends in her “new mommy” group, Lucy gravitates towards Corgan. However, in the climax of the film, Corgan reveals herself to be just as fake and manipulative as the nurses at Dr. Hindle’s office. Even a seasoned horror fan like myself had her suspicions, but (probably much like Lucy) I had hope for Corgan that she would be different. She wasn’t.
Allow me to get on a soapbox for a moment: I would argue that False Positive is a feminist movie. A good feminist movie can tackle the major issues, and be pro-women, while also criticizing women. Dawn, Rita, and Corgan, along with several other female characters in the movie, prove that sometimes, as ugly a truth as it may be: women can be part of the problem.
FALSE POSITIVE: THE SPOOKS
How can I put this nicely: I’m not a fan of horror movies that rely on jump scares. I’m easily startled; not scared, startled. If I don’t hear your footsteps behind me, you could approach me holding an ice cream cone and a puppy and I’d still scream my head off when I turn around to see you. As a result, if your only way of terrifying me is a loud crash in a sea of silence, or a scary monster appearing out of nowhere, I’m not impressed.
False Positive impressed me. There was a single jump scare, and it jolted me enough to make me scream. There’s a scene in which Lucy and Adrian are getting ready to leave for an event. Lucy hears something fall over in their darkened apartment, and Adrian sets down a dark hall to investigate the sound. We see the hallway disappear into darkness, and we wait. For a monster to jump out, for a bloody creature to come from the side (where we’d least expect it), for a loud violin screech as a horror unrealized attacks. Instead, Adrian quietly emerges from the darkness, saying he couldn’t find anything.
Lucy is on edge for almost the entirety of the movie. I, too, was on edge the entirety of the movie. Because my mind was racing on the various roads this story could take, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. This movie keeps you waiting for that other shoe to drop.
What is the shoe? No, Lucy’s not having a devil baby, a la Rosemary’s Baby. Instead, she birthed a baby with Hindle’s sperm, not her husband’s. Hindle believes the world is filled with terrible people, and that if more people produced children with his genetics, it will become a better, more civilized place.
If you really want to scare people, show them a mirror: the monsters are real. They don’t have three eyes and want to eat your face, they have a lot of money and support eugenics.
SHE MINORED IN FILM AND THEREFORE UNDERSTANDS ‘CINEMA’
THE CINEMATIC DETAILS
In the first few minutes of meeting Dr. Hindle, he remarks that he wishes he could clone Adrian. Later, Adrian says that he wants to name their child Adrian, if it’s a boy. That, combined with the frequent mirror shots of Adrian and Lucy discussing their fertility issues, had me thinking that Lucy wasn’t creating a child that was equal parts Adrian and Lucy, but rather just being used as a vessel for a clone of Adrian. I thought the terrible reveal would be that this was sci-fi cloning. A misdirect!
Later in the film, Lucy walks through her bathroom, with the same mirror effect, only one side she looks like a worn out emotional wreck, and the other she looks like a bloody monster. Perhaps the duplicity is making way to reveal there are two Lucys! One Lucy is carrying the twin boys, one Lucy is carrying the single girl. One version is bringing Adrian lunch, the other is bringing him lunch ten minutes later. Is this a feminist version of Jordan Peele’s Us? ANOTHER misdirect!
I don’t think this film knew where it was going the whole time. There was no clear cut message, but rather commentary on different aspects of reality. I’ve tried to break it down as best I could here:
The Feminist Take
Lucy is regularly lied to, manipulated, and betrayed, by both men and women in this film. Her boss escorts her out of her office by putting a hand on the small of her back (if you weren’t aware, this right here is a no-no, always and forever). Her boss takes her off a huge work project, but they use her ideas to carry it. Everyone dismisses her concerns about her pregnancy because her perfect, handsome, white male doctor doesn’t share them. The world believes the man, not the woman.
Dr. Hindle makes it to the cover of a medical magazine. His story takes up 90 percent of the cover, with the remaining ten percent being a small splash of Grace Singleton, an African midwife.
Early in her pregnancy, the Doctor informs Lucy that she has two “sacks” in her uterus: one containing twin boys, one containing a single girl. In this situation, a “selective reduction” will make for a healthier pregnancy and a healthier baby (or, in this case, babies). Hindle and Adrian strongly urge Lucy to to “reduce” the female, but she chooses to “reduce” the twin boys.
Surprise! Lucy gives birth to the twin boys, with the bloody remains of the tiny girl attached to the afterbirth. Her husband assures her all will be well, as he signs off to join the medical practice with the man that raped his wife.
The take in a sentence: the girl dies, the men survive.
Best little detail: When Hindle tells Adrian and Lucy that Lucy is pregnant, Adrian quickly hugs… Hindle. Not his wife/mother of his child. Hm.
The “Medicine Bad, New Age Practices Good” Take
Dr. Hindle’s office is cold and artificial. The doctor and nurses ignore every time Lucy shows anxiousness or nervousness at her pregnancy. Grace Singleton’s introduction shows a warm, comforting office. This introduction comes in the form of a video on Grace’s personal website. Grace calls out the medical industry, and men, for normalizing drugs and violent methods during birth, taking the glory of childbirth away from the mother. The video shows disturbing imagery of hospital childbirth contrasted with homeopathic birthing methods. When Grace and Lucy meet, Grace makes Lucy feel validated, respected, and happy, possibly for the first time during her pregnancy.
The take, in a sentence: Hospitals will wreck the mother, and natural birth will inspire her.
Best little detail: I will forever be haunted by a specific image from this video: a newborn trapped and disfigured in a claw-like tool, after clearly being all but ripped from the womb.
The “White Women, Am I Right?” Take
After viewing the first trailer for False Positive, with Grace’s introduction as an African midwife, I looked to my husband and said “this feels like an example of the Magical Negro stereotype. I don’t think that’s allowed anymore.”
Sure enough, at the end of that movie, Lucy visits Grace, looking for consolation. When Lucy comments that she remembered her office being more tribal, we see Grace in a traditional doctor’s office, wearing a normal blouse and pants. Gone are the masks and Kufi hat. Grace replies firmly, even coldly, “My office has always looked like this. I am not your magical Negress.”
The take in a sentence: White women diminish women of color into harmful stereotypes.
Best little detail: During the final scene with Lucy, the background is warped… much like the warped sense of identity we see of Grace through Lucy’s eyes.
The examples of each take, when divided into percentages, take up 70 percent, 20 percent, and 10 percent of False Positive, respectively. Funny how the story calling out white woman’s hypocrisy gets the least screen-time and attention. Even funnier when you consider that the primary writers are white.
MY MOST GRISLY, SPICY TAKE
Ilana Glazer, the principal actress, writer, and producer of False Positive, identifies as feminist. The modern feminist, typically, is pro-choice, AKA, in favor of abortion. I am also a pro-choice feminist, but this movie doesn’t really make us look good.
Truthfully, I don’t see how “selective reduction” isn’t abortion, in and of itself. I think that the pro-life people in my family would be horrified if I was expecting six kids, but “selectively reduced” four of them. I understand that it’s a gray area, but looking at it under a microscope creates an uncomfortable image.
At the point of this “selective reduction,” Lucy is barely halfway through her first trimester, a point in which most experts agree that what’s growing inside you isn’t so much a fetus as it is a clump of fetal cells. The doctor explains, and we see in the final minutes of the film, after the birth of the actual babies, the “reduced” comes out as well, attached to the afterbirth. In other words, Lucy should expect to see a healthy baby girl and a big clump of cells attached to the afterbirth. Lucy delivers the twin boys, and the tiny clump of what would have been her daughter, Wendy.
Lucy breaks into Doctor Hindle’s office to steal her afterbirth (which is somehow just sitting in a medical Ziploc bag like a goldfish in his lab), with the remains of Wendy still attached. In the final moments of the film, Lucy holds Wendy to her breast, who stirs and latches onto Lucy.
In this moment, the aborted fetus, the clump of cells, is a baby, capable of desiring and receiving nourishment. That’s not very pro-choice a message. It’s a very unsettling thing, and it might not be thought-provoking in the way that the movie intended.
FINAL NOTES ON FALSE POSITIVE
The big question remains: Did I like False Positive? The answer: I don’t know. To say yes doesn’t feel right, but saying no feels even less accurate. It succeeds on multiple levels. It engaged me from start to finish. I felt scared from the first moment. However, from a storytelling perspective, it feels uneven. Some parts felt heavy-handed, other parts saw little resolution.
As I mentioned earlier, I couldn’t tell how much of the events of the movie were real. Between the unreliable narrator, the gaslighting, and the so-called “mommy brain,” determining the reality vs. the delusional proved tricky. The final three minutes of the movie disturb, but the confusing layers make it difficult to distinguish how disturbing. Did she hand her twin babies off to Adrian and kick him out of the house? Were the twins thrown out the window to fly off to Neverland? Are Dr. Hindle and his psychotic nurse dead by Lucy’s hands? Did Wendy, the girl that she had wanted, actually somehow live? What really happens? What’s a hallucination?
I think there’s a difference between a being a confusing movie and being a confused movie. The multiple layers of the film overwhelm it with potential, but the execution left me wanting. That said, the movie held my attention the whole time. It’s not a loud movie. I’ve fallen asleep in action movies before, so if a quiet movie (that I watched in the dark, at night, after a long workday) can keep me awake and focused, it must be more than halfway interesting!
Something tells me that False Positive might experience a cult rebirth in the years to come. I, for one, am shocked to hear that people didn’t like “The Craft” when it first came out, considering its iconic status.
If I can give one bit of advice, much like theme parks or sushi, you probably shouldn’t indulge in this if you’re expecting. It might be too much.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go not have kids or trust my husband for a little bit.