False Positive (Movie)

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    The Comedy, and the Horror, of the Infertility Plot

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    Onscreen, assisted reproductive technology is a double-edged device, representing women’s empowerment, or their exploitation.“Scrambled” is a romantic comedy about a woman who falls in love with her decision to freeze her eggs. Nellie, a 34-year-old perma-bridesmaid, is wasted and alone at yet another wedding when she is struck by the fear that her fertility may peak before her romantic situation is resolved.The conventional romantic comedy may culminate in marriage, but “Scrambled” leads Nellie toward a procedure that extends the timeline of her own marriage plot. Nellie (Leah McKendrick, who also writes and directs the film) gets her happy ending from an embryology lab. “You were no accident,” she tells one of her cryogenically preserved eggs. “You were one of the most intentional things that I have ever done.”Reproductive technologies are increasingly assisting in human conception (even as the Alabama Supreme Court has complicated their use), and they have become familiar narrative devices, too. Their meaning is double-edged. “Scrambled,” with its oddball cheer, gives fertility treatments an empowering gloss. But an emerging horror genre sharpens the same technologies into instruments of exploitation, turning clinics into torture chambers and doctors into demons. The deus ex machina of assisted reproduction can be a blessing or a curse, depending on the god who sent the machine.After swigging from the sentimental techno-optimism of “Scrambled,” I chased it with a wave of recent downers: I watched “False Positive,” the 2021 horror movie in which Lucy (Ilana Glazer) is subdued by a creepy fertility clinic; “Dead Ringers,” the 2023 limited series in which Rachel Weisz plays a pair of twin gynecologists; and “American Horror Story: Delicate,” the latest installment of the FX horror anthology series about an actress (Emma Roberts) who attempts to secure a baby and an Oscar with the help of her ambiguously sinister publicist (Kim Kardashian).As I watched these horror stories, I found myself counting their clichés on both hands. In the standard fertility-horror plot, a wealthy white couple will report to a an experimental clinic. Its staff will forgo scrubs for bespoke costumes resembling clerics or Stepford wives. An inscrutable and potentially supernatural ultrasound reading will occur. A woman will struggle to conceive, and this difficulty will be blamed on her careerism. She will be instructed to ingest strange tinctures and coached to mistrust her own mind. Her terror will be dismissed as “pregnancy brain” or “hormones.” Her pain will be denied. Her male partner will collude with a male doctor behind her back. Her female friend will be in on it, too. In the end, her pregnancy will be simulated, sabotaged or terminated without her knowledge or consent.In “American Horror Story: Delicate,” an actress (Emma Roberts, right) attempts to secure a baby and an Oscar with the help of her sinister publicist (Kim Kardashian, left).Eric Liebowitz/FXWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘False Positive’ and the Horror-Filled Truth About Fertility Treatments

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      The new Hulu movie is the rare Hollywood production that portrays the struggles to conceive as women actually experience them.As millions of women know, fertility treatments can be a nightmare. The painful, sterile procedures, the loss of control over your own body, the never-ending blood tests and experiments and strange medications that take over your refrigerator shelves and your life.If so many women have endured this terror in real life, do we really need an exaggerated Hollywood version of our experiences? After seeing the new Hulu movie “False Positive” and other recent screen depictions, I would say, it depends who’s watching.Like so many others, I did not experience the “Knocked Up” version of pregnancy in real life. It took a lot more than one night of drunk sex with Seth Rogen to do the job. Instead of being rom-com cute, my story of becoming a parent was heartbreaking, tedious and dominated by scenes of exhausted women packed into the fertility-clinic waiting room. That might not sound cinematic, but when you’re going through it, the inner turmoil can feel as dramatic and dire as any war story. And audiences love a good war story, right? So why not ours?Watching “False Positive” and the stunning in vitro fertilization episode of Netflix’s “Master of None,” I saw my story, the story of so many others, turned into the main event instead of a subplot or a character’s back story. Surrogacy and adoption and miscarriage and in vitro fertilization have been portrayed onscreen before, from “Friends” and “Sex and the City” to “Fuller House” and Princess Carolyn’s fertility struggles on “BoJack Horseman.” But even if those shows handled the topic with sensitivity and honesty, the stories were still treated as secondary plots.I felt for Charlotte as she tried to get pregnant on “Sex and the City,” but the day-to-day ugliness that infertility can bring was glossed over. To be fair, the show had other stories to tell. Still, Charlotte didn’t need to stress about the mind-boggling price of I.V.F. medications or the cost of adoption.I hadn’t seen the raw truth about infertility onscreen until I watched Tamara Jenkins’s “Private Life” (2018), which focused entirely on the “by any means necessary” fertility quest of a New York couple in their 40s, played by Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti. They tried (and failed) to appear calm in the fertility clinic waiting room. He gave her hormone shots. They fought and they made up. The scenes unfolded as in real life.There was no cutting away to see what Samantha or Carrie or Miranda were up to in an effort to avoid becoming too heavy. In “Private Life,” the story felt familiar — raw, sad, funny and, yes, dramatic.The conception efforts of a couple (Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti) are the primary focus of “Private Life.”Jojo Whilden/NetflixFertility treatments and pregnancy can be terrifying, and “False Positive” takes that fact and runs with it, pushing this narrative into “American Psycho” territory. It opens with a shot of a woman in a crisp white button-down, covered in blood, trudging ominously down the street. Directed by John Lee and co-written by Lee and the film’s star, Ilana Glazer, “False Positive” opts for over-the-top horror and social satire instead of the quietly funny, everyday moments of “Private Life.” But the filmmakers aren’t exploiting a painful experience for the sake of some scares. They’re taking that painful experience, one that is so visceral for so many women, and allowing us to laugh, even as we cringe.Glazer, with her signature wild curls ironed straight, plays Lucy, a “marketing genius” married to a Peloton-loving surgeon named Adrian (Justin Theroux). Without an ounce of irony, Lucy says things like: “Am I going to be one of those women who has it all? My career, my kids, my old man by my side?”In other words, she’s the kind of woman Glazer’s “Broad City” character might literally slap into shape if they ran into each other on a Brooklyn street. More

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      Ilana Glazer on the Terror of the Modern Birth System and ‘False Positive’

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      The “Broad City” co-creator starred in and co-wrote a horror film about pregnancy. It’s being released just as she is becoming a mother.Ilana Glazer was trying without much success to think of movies devoted to the experience of conceiving and carrying a child.“There’s not a lot from the pregnant person’s point of view,” Glazer said. She pointed, for example, to “Knocked Up,” the 2007 comedy that starred Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl, but that was told “from the inseminator’s perspective,” she said.There was “Rosemary’s Baby,” the 1968 thriller adapted by Roman Polanski, which fit the narrative bill but was still difficult to endorse. As Glazer succinctly summarized: “Great movie — not a great guy.”And the 1987 comedy “Three Men and a Baby” definitely didn’t make the cut. “How many men do we need to tell about how this baby got here?” Glazer exclaimed.The topic was especially personal for Glazer, a creator and star of the Comedy Central series “Broad City.” She was 36 weeks pregnant during this phone conversation in late May and apologetic for the fact that she was eating while she spoke.“I’m stuffing my face,” she said. “I have no choice. I’ve got to be eating this pita and dip right now.”Glazer with Justin Theroux in a scene from the film.Anna Kooris/HuluThe subject of childbirth is also of particular interest to Glazer because she is the star and co-writer of a new film, “False Positive,” that casts her as a woman whose efforts to have a child draw her into a nightmarish spiral of uncertainty and deceit. The movie, which is directed and co-written by John Lee, made its debut last week at the Tribeca Film Festival and was released by Hulu on June 25.In reviews of the film, The Hollywood Reporter praised “False Positive” as a “juicy genre entry about how women’s reproductive systems are treated like coveted real estate,” and The Wrap called it a “smart, sharp shocker.”Glazer, 34, started working on “False Positive” long before she became pregnant, and while it is one of the most prominent projects she has appeared in since “Broad City” ended in 2019, it is by no means a comedy.It is an unapologetic work of body horror — one that begins with the image of Glazer’s character disoriented and awash in blood as she wanders the streets of New York. The provocations escalate from there.This onscreen version of Glazer is very different from the one audiences have grown accustomed to seeing — not happy-go-lucky, but frantic and fighting for her life — and writing and filming the movie tested her in ways that comedy had not entirely prepared her for.But Glazer said these efforts were necessary to tell a story about a modern childbirth process that she fears has become debased and commodified, particularly in the United States — fears she had held well before she became acquainted with it firsthand.“I’m really obsessed with how in-plain-sight evil the system that we live in is,” she said. “It’s absurd and it’s funny, even though it’s horrible, the way we are stripped of our humanity. Everyone is gaslit into thinking it is normal.”Glazer wanted to tell a story about the modern birth process and how it has become commodified: “Everyone is gaslit into thinking it is normal.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesGlazer and Lee started working together when Lee, a creator of subversive TV comedies like “Wonder Showzen” and “Xavier: Renegade Angel,” was hired to direct episodes of “Broad City” beginning with its first season in 2014.They bonded over a shared worldview and talked about their work outside the show, including an amorphous narrative piece that Lee was writing with the author and TV creator Alissa Nutting (“Made for Love”).Lee, who described that piece as a “tone poem,” said that it drew inspiration from tragic events in his life: his wife and frequent collaborator, Alyson Levy, had had a miscarriage and his father had died. More

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      ‘False Positive’ Review: Pregnancy Scares

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      This Hulu horror movie is a tepid, scattered look at the dark side of childbirth starring the “Broad City” co-creator Ilana Glazer.In recent years, mainstream horror movies like “Hereditary” and “It Follows” have embraced a seemingly more sophisticated form that unites social and psychological drama with a sleek visual sensibility. But possessing these ingredients does not a winner make. Case in point: “False Positive,” a handsome new Hulu feature that aspires to be a modern version of “Rosemary’s Baby,” but that ultimately lands somewhere between tepid and confused.Directed by John Lee from a screenplay he wrote with Ilana Glazer, his “Broad City” collaborator and the star of the film, “False Positive” explores the dark side of pregnancy in the age of fertility treatments.The concept, at least, is promising. After two years of attempting to conceive, Lucy (Glazer) and Adrian (Justin Theroux), a wealthy Manhattan couple, turn to John Hindle (Pierce Brosnan), a debonair fertility doctor with a menacing glint in his eyes. The oddly simple procedure works and soon Lucy is carrying not one, but three babies.To prevent future complications, however, she is forced to undergo “selective reduction” that will either destroy her male twins or her single girl. Against Hindle’s recommendation and her husband’s desires, she chooses the girl, unfurling what may or may not be a conspiracy to wrest control of Lucy’s pregnancy from her.That women continue to lack autonomy over their own bodies is indeed a horrifying reality. But Lee and Glazer, torn between the impulse to satirize an upper-crust milieu of would-be parents and the desire to depict a complex mental breakdown, unleash a watered-down and occasionally contradictory critique of, well, just about everything — white liberals, the health care system, the patriarchy.And despite its vaguely unsettling clinical ambience, very little about the film as it makes its way to an ultimately flat and predictable final twist, manages to feel tense or thrilling. Or even funny for that matter.False PositiveRated R for disturbing/bloody images, sexual content, graphic nudity and language. Running time: 1 hours 32 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More