If you’ve ever thought, “What if Rosemary’s Baby were remade as a Hulu Original, but with the subtlety of an HR training video and the moral depth of a fertility clinic brochure?” then False Positive is precisely that cursed wish granted. It wants to be a feminist psychological horror about reproductive control, medical patriarchy, and gaslighting. What it mostly is, though, is 90 minutes of Ilana Glazer being told she’s crazy by three different haircuts.
On paper, it sounds promising: Ilana Glazer playing it straight, Pierce Brosnan as a smug villain doctor, Justin Theroux as a supportive-husband-turned-red-flag, creepy fertility clinic stuff, trippy visuals. In execution, it’s like the film itself was selectively reduced: interesting ideas terminated, clichés carried to term.
The Setup: Conception by Plot Device
Lucy (Ilana Glazer) is a Manhattan copywriter with a blandly perfect husband, Adrian (Justin Theroux), and the kind of big-window apartment that screams “fictional New York.” They’ve been trying to conceive for two years, which in movie time means the clock is not just ticking, it’s blaring.
Enter Dr. John Hindle (Pierce Brosnan), fertility legend and Adrian’s former mentor. That detail alone should set off alarms—if your husband’s old male authority figure wants to handle your uterus personally, maybe get a second opinion. But Lucy and Adrian happily sign up for what is basically “designer pregnancy with built-in evil.”
Hindle inseminates Lucy with his own special technique, and ta-da: she’s pregnant with triplets—male twins and a female fetus. Because this is a horror film and not a Hallmark movie, Hindle immediately suggests a selective reduction. Keep the twins or the girl, but three is “too risky.”
Lucy is instantly attached to the idea of having a girl, so she and Adrian choose to keep the daughter. Which, given the title of the movie, is the cinematic equivalent of walking into a haunted house and saying, “Well, I’m sure nothing will go wrong.”
Red Flags, But Make It Medical
From here, the movie goes full “red flag speedrun.”
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Lucy hears Adrian and Hindle talking while she’s sedated
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She bleeds heavily and is told it’s no big deal
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Every concern she raises is dismissed as antenatal depression
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She’s given meds, patted on the head, and told she’s lucky
Lucy joins a group of expectant mothers and befriends Corgan (Sophia Bush), who seems cool until she slowly morphs into a Pinterest board for internalized patriarchy.
Online, Lucy becomes obsessed with Grace Singleton, a spiritual midwife whose whole vibe is “earth-mother goddess with decent lighting.” Grace represents the “natural” side of childbirth: warm, intuitive, empowering. So naturally, the film spends a lot of time setting her up only to undermine her too, because in False Positive, literally no one in the pregnancy-industrial complex is allowed to be fully supportive or useful.
Lucy starts having visions, nightmares, disturbing dreams—bloody water, surreal sex, ominous imagery. Unfortunately, the dream sequences feel less like psychological insight and more like the editor got bored and opened the “horror visual preset” menu.
Gaslighting As a Service
The core of the movie is gaslighting, over and over, in increasingly obvious ways:
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Hindle dismisses Lucy’s physical symptoms
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Adrian plays the “concerned husband” while quietly siding with Hindle
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Corgan betrays Lucy, handing over her evidence “for her own good”
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Everyone insists that she’s unstable, hormonal, irrational
Which would be terrifying if the movie didn’t hit the same note every five minutes. Subtle horror is when you slowly start to doubt what’s real. Here, you doubt whether the script trusts you to understand what gaslighting is without repeating it like a medical disclaimer.
By the time Lucy’s baby shower rolls around, we’ve seen enough creepy hints and passive-aggressive conversations to know: yes, something is very wrong, and no, the men in this movie cannot be trusted around either ovaries or ethics.
Then the film starts layering in Peter Pan references and the idea of “never growing up,” which is poetic in theory and kind of goofy in practice. Peter Pan’s shadow shows up, blood spreads on a book cover, and somewhere a metaphor whimpers under the weight of being overexplained.
The Big Reveal: It’s Always the Old White Guy
Lucy eventually cracks Adrian’s safe (because of course he has one) and finds a file proving she’s being monitored and manipulated. Corgan, panicked, hands it to Adrian instead of, you know, a lawyer. Everyone keeps insisting Lucy is imagining things—even as your own eyes roll so far back you start seeing your past poor movie choices.
Then comes the birth. Lucy goes to Grace for a natural delivery, but plot twist: she’s not giving birth to the girl at all—it’s the male twins. There’s heavy bleeding, panic, and suddenly we’re back in Hindle’s sterile clinic, where he delivers the second twin like it’s just another Tuesday in quietly evil fertility work.
Disillusioned, Lucy returns to Hindle’s office later and sneaks into “The Lab”—a room literally labeled that, because why not go full cartoon?
Inside, she finds:
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Her removed placenta
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The reduced female fetus in a jar
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Rows of vials of sperm—all Hindle’s
Hindle then calmly reveals the big twist: he uses his own sperm on all his patients because he believes his genes are superior. So the clinic is less “miracle of life” and more “Pierce Brosnan’s Unwanted Population Control Experiment.”
Honestly, this should be horrifying. It is horrifying. But the execution lands somewhere between “shocking commentary on bodily autonomy” and “Black Mirror episode pitched in a hurry.”
Lucy reacts as anyone would: with violent rage. She:
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Smashes Hindle’s head with a mirror
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Straps him into the exam chair
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Fights off Nurse Dawn
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Destroys his sperm fridge like she’s rage-quitting his bloodline
It’s cathartic, yes. It’s also the first time the movie feels fully alive instead of vaguely smug.
The Finale: Motherhood, Madness, or Both?
Lucy returns home clutching the preserved fetus like a grotesque keepsake. In a surreal sequence, she imagines releasing the twins out the window, letting them float away Peter Pan–style, which is the least realistic depiction of child care in the entire movie.
Adrian comes home and tries to sell her on the idea that his partnership with Hindle would have been great for them both. This is after:
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Lying to her
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Helping gaslight her
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Being fine with their doctor doing eugenics lite
Incredibly, Lucy does not accept this TED Talk on Toxic Husbandry. She hands him the twins and tells him to leave.
Then, in the movie’s last big swing, she attempts to breastfeed the preserved fetus, hallucinating that it latches and suckles. It’s meant to be ambiguous: Is she fully broken? Is this an expression of grief? Is it metaphor? Is she liberated, insane, both?
In practice, it mostly plays like: “We needed a shocking final image and didn’t fully care if it matched the character arc.”
Tone Problems: Satire Without Bite, Horror Without Depth
False Positive flirts with several tones:
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Satirical takedown of male-dominated medicine
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Psychological horror about autonomy and trust
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Dark comedy about the horrors of pregnancy culture
It dabbles in all of them and commits to none. You can feel Ilana Glazer trying to bring some edge to the material—there are flickers of the sharp social commentary she’s capable of—but it never quite lands.
The movie is too serious to be fully fun, too on-the-nose to be genuinely unsettling, and too in love with its own metaphors to let the horror breathe.
Pierce Brosnan is perfectly cast as “charmingly sinister fertility god,” but his character is so blatantly creepy from minute one that the eventual reveal has zero shock value. Justin Theroux’s Adrian is such an obvious weasel that watching Lucy trust him for so long becomes less tragic and more frustrating.
Final Verdict: Pregnant With Ideas, Delivered as a Lecture
False Positive desperately wants to say something scathing about:
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Men controlling women’s bodies
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The gaslighting of pregnant people
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The commodification of fertility
And those are real, important topics! But the film approaches them like a thesis paper in a horror costume: rigid, obvious, and occasionally unhinged in the least useful ways.
You’re left with:
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Strong performances wandering inside a muddled script
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Stylish moments wrapped around hollow suspense
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A finale that confuses grotesque imagery with thematic clarity
In the end, the real false positive is the movie itself. All the tests—cast, premise, themes—suggest a healthy, horrifying little genre baby.
What we got instead is a messy, underdeveloped metaphor, delivered with great drama but not nearly enough heart.
