Review: False Positive

Image courtesy of A24.

"False Positive" is a horror thriller with a few things on its mind — so, it's a shame that it doesn't do a better job of articulating them. The film aims to be a modern "Rosemary's Baby," but without the Satan worship, and chronicles the fear — and possible paranoia — of a young mother in waiting whose nine months of pregnancy are anything but a joy.

For starters, Lucy (Ilana Glazer) and her husband, Adrian (Justin  Theroux), have long tried and failed to conceive a child. Considering that they are both getting older, he proposes visiting a doctor named Hindle (Pierce Brosnan), who is a former teacher of Adrian's and, apparently, a whiz at helping women having difficulty getting pregnant with carrying it off.

But something seems amiss, at first, just with Hindle, whose promises seem to be too good to be true, and his creepy head nurse (played by Gretchen Mol), but eventually with Adrian, who appears to be hiding something, and everyone else with whom Lucy comes into contact.

There are some genuinely interesting ideas at play here — women's lack of control over their own bodies due to domineering men's schemes, sexism in the workplace (Lucy is constantly having to order food for her otherwise male coworkers), plot threads revolving around consent and racial issues — Lucy comes to consider a Black midwife as some sort of mystical figure who will bring her to enlightenment, and is then called out on it.

The problem is that all of these potentially intriguing concepts just get thrown at the audience, often with little follow-through, and seemingly without an overall purpose. For example, the scene involving the midwife comes somewhat out of nowhere and feels tacked on, rather than fully developed. Also, the continuous use of the term "mommy brain" begins to grate on the nerves — as it's supposed to, considering how the other characters wield it as a weapon against Lucy.

While the twist ending is one that most won't exactly figure out, it's creepy enough to land a punch had the filmmakers known how to present it. As it stands, it's just an unsettling scene — somewhat lacking in tension due to the near-comedic way it plays out — that leads to an even ickier scene that... well, I just can't, as the kids used to say.

The film's final image is meant to be grotesquely bizarre — and it is, but it's yet another attempted shock value moment in a movie teeming with such instances, none of which blend to form a cohesive whole. Jordan Peele's "Get Out" ushered in a new era of socially conscious horror that has seen some bright spots, but "False Positive" is a film with a number of hot topic concepts floating around in search of a thesis that can bind them together.