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The first image of John Lee and Ilana Glazers fertility horror filmFalse Positiveis a flash-forward.
We are clearly witnessing the end of something awful: Glazer staggers down a New York street.
Her face is a mask of blood; police lights flicker against her gore-spattered shirt.
Which one will be the monster?
The movie hints that, in some way … they all are.
The men are clearly lying.
People keep telling her not to worry in the middle of the biggest event of her life.
The men might be gaslighting her or simply patronizing her.
Lucys agency and sanity slip away.
Theres a littleCarriemixed in, andMedea,and, for the really scary details, real life.
Despite this promising set of influences, though,False Positivefails to cohere.
The sections that do work are mostly predicted there in that first image.
At other points, the film revels in the bloody, gloppy, stinky part of reproduction.
Lucy sees blood everywhere, whether leaching out of a book or pooling between her legs.
Her dreams are red, membranous throbs.
Blood triggers the filmmakers best impulses whenever the props department reaches for the Karo syrup, things get real.
In other moments, though, the movie can ring false.
Theres a lot of wonderfully gross stuff about pregnancy that it shies away from, for instance.
And where the pregnancy doesnt seem totally real, other parts of the world are overtly fake.
(Adrian is a doctor who never doctors.)
The anemic sound design makes every restaurant, every walk through a park, nearly silent.
Its not spooky, unless you are terrified by the aesthetics of student film.
We have his number before we even meet him.
Still, the ideas that set this game in motion are provocative.
At work, Lucy is trying to sell a product called Wyth, which has no actual form.
The movie only lets us see a blur of millennial targeting and self-care vaguery.
(This is one of the few places the script shows co-writer GlazersBroad Citytartness.)
Is the pregnancy process stealing something that shes already begun to give away?
Sometimes the monsters in the mirror.
So the movie, despite its weaknesses, has a heartbeat.
As horror, judged on my own extremely sensitive scare-o-meter, it barely registered.
But that doesnt mean it wont freak you out.
Here, though, the film shows us something objectively true.
When Lucys husband wants to get it up, he watches a video of a woman getting choked.
When he comes out, hes gentle and sweet.
But weve seen the skull beneath the skin.
