Film Review: FALSE POSITIVE: A Pregnancy Horror with Some Strange Vibes [Tribeca 2021]

False Positive Review

False Positive (2021) Film Review from the 20th Annual Tribeca Film Festival, a movie directed by John Lee, starring Ilana Glazer, Justin Theroux, Gretchen Mol, Sabina Gadecki, Pierce Brosnan, Josh Hamilton, Nils Lawton, Sullivan Jones, James Cusati-Moyer, Lucy Walters, Jaygee Macapugay, Sophia Bush, Danielle Slavick, Francesca Faridany, Kelly AuCoin, and Zainab Jah.

John Lee is the co-creator of Wonder Showzen and Xavier: Renegade Angel, two shows so bizarre that they’ll probably cause you to dissociate for very different reasons. And yet, there is brilliance to their unsettling madness that makes them oddly alluring. And of course, their short episodic natures make their near-nauseating proclivities all the more palatable, too.

Obviously, such characteristics will have to be tweaked when transferring over to feature-length cinema, but with Lee’s sophomore effort False Positive they seem to be altogether subdued.

Marketed as a “contemporary take on Rosemary’s Baby”, Lee and co-writers Alissa Nutting and Ilana Glazer (the latter of whom also produces and stars) sure do wring that inspiration dry. Glazer plays Lucy, a mid-thirties working woman who desperately wants a child with her husband, Adrian (Justin Theroux). After two years of continued complications with conception, they turn to Dr. John Hindle (Pierce Brosnan) for help, an ART specialist and former professor of Adrian’s thought to be a miracle worker in the reproductive realm.

Thanks to him Lucy finally becomes pregnant … too pregnant, actually, as both a set of twin boys and a girl develop in her womb. Hindle recommends choosing between either the twins or the girl, given Lucy’s medical history and the possible complications if she were to carry all three to term. In wanting to make up for the shortcomings in her own mother-daughter relationship, Lucy decides on keeping the girl – who she names “Wendy” after a Peter Pan fondness. But as the weeks go by Lucy becomes paranoid, seeing nightmarish visions that begin to make her unhinged. Adrian, Dr. Hindle, and her friends are all convinced that it’s just hyperactive “mommy brain”, but Lucy isn’t as flippant. She thinks something might be wrong with Wendy, and that Adrian and Hindle might’ve had something to do with it.

It’s sort of staggering how blatantly False Positive lifts from the previously-mentioned Rosemary’s Baby – not just in basic premise, but also in particular shot and scene recreation. From the phantasmagoric impregnation sequence to shots of Lucy traipsing around her New York apartment at night, butcher knife gripped tight, on the prowl for answers, False Positive feels less like an homage to the 1968 horror classic and more like an unauthorized remake. If Roman Polanski wasn’t a pedophile I’d feel bad for him getting ripped off like this.

And yet Rosemary’s Baby isn’t the only horror classic to get treated to a re-enactment here. One can spot recreations of iconic shots from Kubrick’s The Shining and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, plot parallels to Richard Donner’s The Omen, and references to more recent works from the J-horror subgenre or even Von Trier’s Antichrist.

The blatantness with which Lee and Glazer present these “homages” feels too obvious to be mere coincidence, but they present them in such a heavy and serious tone that it’s hard to suss out what their ultimate purpose is supposed to be in the overall narrative. If it’s truly meant as homage, then it feels incredibly amateurish; if it’s meant as camp, then it fails because the film never achieves a suitably heightened sense of reality. In fact, the only heightened sense that False Positive is going for is that same self-aggrandizing atmosphere of prestige that so many try-hards have imitated over the past few years, inundating the zeitgeist with so many tiresome discussions on the merits of (or even mere existence of) “elevated horror” as a result. (It doesn’t help that Pawel Pogorzelski, an Ari Aster regular, shoots this in his normal highly-staged style that makes everything look like it has a plastic sheen to it, as if visually adding an air of stifled gravitas to the whole ordeal.)

These moments ultimately play like some sort of inside joke with Lee, Glazer, and the rest of the crew, but the joke appears to be heckling the classics for no particular reason. Mind you, I’m all for shitting on canon and tearing down all senses of gatekeeping, but maybe do it in a way that doesn’t make you feel like jealous hipster wannabes? Maybe critique your perceived shortcomings with the material rather than shallowly chiding them outright? Then again, the point of inside jokes are that they’re really only funny to those in on it – they’re supposed to be irritating to everyone else. In that case, I guess the ultimate joke is on me, the audience, the true outsider. What brilliantly pretentious tact.

But as to not solely resort to these filmmakers’ same tools of cynicism, allow me to simultaneously posit that False Positive has quite a bit to admire.

Lee’s filmic structures fall prey to the same third-act shift that both of Aster’s works do (all three of which are, coincidentally, all A24 projects), but unlike Midsommar or Hereditary that resort to full-on supernaturalism as a cop-out, False Positive goes in the other direction: the horror is not something otherworldly but is very much of our world, which is that dehumanizing greed and the human ego can lead to great travesty. Such knowledge makes the first twist visible from far out, but it doesn’t stop us from hoping that that’s not the case nor from subsequently feeling our stomachs drop in shock when it’s finally revealed.

Lee and Glazer are also subtle in their analysis of sexism that (pregnant) women can experience on the daily, as well as body horror as a metaphor for society’s othering of those with birthing bodies.

Most of Lucy’s anxieties are written off as nothing but hormonal imbalance due to pregnancy, and even when she’s not hallucinating things she’s being off-handedly belittled for her stature. For instance, she gets taken off leading her first major account at her job (where she’s also the only female employee) under the assumption that the pregnancy will make it difficult for her to keep up. Her friend Corgan (Sophia Bush) quietly questions why Lucy refuses to slow down and become complacent with a housewife lifestyle. These points don’t necessarily lead to a cogent end – in fact, some are so off-hand that they’re never addressed again – but that constant deluge of criticism creates an aura of worry with Lucy that catalyzes her self-doubt and contributes to an endless sense of stress for us viewers.

It’s also notable in how False Positive doesn’t let Lucy off the hook for her own culpability in microaggressions, particularly in her projection of similar societal roles onto others. Her midwife Grace (Zainab Jah) calls this out late in the film after Lucy realizes her voodoo-like practices were just hallucinations themselves, reminding Lucy that she’s not any sort of mystical savior. It’s a comment on how Black people and other people of color have long been stigmatized within the medical realm (and continue to be), as well as their cultures fetishized by those looking for alternative methods. In that unique way, False Positive actually does feel like a true update to Rosemary’s Baby as opposed to just a rip-off of it.

Still, False Positive leaves one feeling annoyingly split. Its off-putting humor, ambivalent inspiration, and general monotony make it hard to stay engaged, but it’s also terrifying as a treatise on sexism and the penchant for human cruelty. If you walk out on this cinematic kid for having bad vibes, I wouldn’t blame you.

At least Brosnan’s toothy smile will haunt me for the next few days.

Rating: 5/10

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