FALSE POSITIVE
Lucy and Adrian find their dream fertility doctor in the illustrious Dr. Hindle. But after becoming pregnant, Lucy begins to notice something sinister behind Hindle’s charm, and she sets out to uncover the unsettling truth about him.
It took 8 months to get pregnant with my son. In the grand scheme for a lot of women, that isn’t long at all. Since I turned 35 in the first month of my pregnancy, it was deemed a “geriatric pregnancy.” That felt about as awesome as you might imagine. Growing a human being is stressful enough without the constant barrage of opinions. People telling you what you can and cannot eat, how you should parent, and what you should be feeling. It’s super fun. And by that, I mean it sucks, just in case you didn’t catch the heavy-handed sarcasm. Tribeca Festival 21 film FALSE POSITIVE takes all of that anxiety and cranks it to 11. Ilana Glazer and Justin Theroux play Lucy and Adrian, a couple that has a personal connection with a famed fertility doctor. From the moment Lucy gets a glimpse of her baby on the sonogram, she knows something is very, very wrong.
The script does a solid job setting the stage with the misogyny and gaslighting thrust upon pregnant women. While the internet can be their worst enemy (for the love of God, stay away from WebMD) a mother has instincts that she should never ignore. False Positive smartly plays upon those anxieties and adds highly macabre stakes. You’re not quite sure what is real. It’s intensely dark. Ilana Glazer is pitch-perfect at every turn. Cast her in every genre, right now. Justin Theroux is a fantastic foil. You feel the skin-crawling vibe he unleashes once the audience is placed in Lucy’s shoes. His straight man act makes him all the more unsettling. Dr. Hindle is played brilliantly by Pierce Brosnan. His charm and calmness are grossly offputting even through his perfect smile.
False Positive will hit differently for women with or without fertility issues. It will also have a unique reaction from genre fans. It’s a multifaceted feature from director John Lee, who also wrote the script with Ilana Glazer. While the finale is so batshit crazy it may make your head spin, I can attest that you will not be able to get the images out of your head. They are seared into my brain. I’m still shuddering a week later.
Hulu & A24 will release
FALSE POSITIVE
as a Hulu Original Film on
June 25, 2021
In a world where our entire life exists online, we are constantly in danger of being hacked. Think about it. We bank online, send photos, texts, emails, shop, pay bills, you can now lock and unlock your front door via an app. We take our security for granted. The recent yahoo hack should prove another warning to folks to check privacy settings, though no matter what we do, that vulnerability may never go away. In the new film, I.T., Pierce Brosnan plays a man whose life couldn’t be better, until one man decides he has too much. 
Mike Regan is about to launch “the Uber for private jets” in a new app roll out. When his company hires new tech Ed, who seems to have all the quick fixes, Mike invites him inside his home to tweak the glitches in his smart home. Unable to understand social cues after a short period of time, Ed becomes obsessed with taking Mike down notch by notch. Nothing is off-limits. Ed put Mike’s business, reputation, and family in harm’s way. His actions prove detrimental, but Mike will not allow his entire life to be destroyed. He has to fight firewall with firewall.
I.T. will do nothing less than make you rethink the devices in your hand and how you use them. In a present day where a foreign country is hacking a major political party in real life, that’s awful enough. Perhaps, though, we should be more afraid of the troll in a basement with nothing better to do than destroy others.
You must be logged in to post a comment.