‘False Positive’ Is A Cautionary Tale For Women Who Uphold the Patriarchy

Warning: This article contains spoilers for False Positive on Hulu.

Ilana Glazer‘s character in False Positive—which premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival—is exactly the kind of stuffy, privileged white woman that Ilana Wexler on Broad City used to dunk on. As Lucy in False Positive—the horror movie that began streaming on Hulu today—Glazer is not an outspoken feminist. She smiles and says thank you when a male coworker takes credit for her promotion. She dutifully takes down the office lunch orders. Her signature wild curls have been aggressively straightened. She’s probably never smoked a joint in her life.

The character is a conscious reversal from the outspoken, liberated, messy woman that Glazer used to play on Comedy Central’s Broad City, the show that launched her career. And while it’s odd to see the comedian known for screaming “yas queen” play someone so meek and quiet, the departure is effective in getting across one of the themes of False Positive: women like Lucy need to wake up and smell the patriarchy.

Directed by John Lee, who also co-wrote the script with Glazer, False Positive introduces us to Lucia “Lucy” Martin—a woman who has been trying and failing to get pregnant with her husband Adrian (Justin Theroux) for two years—as she is taking yet another negative pregnancy test. Venting her frustration to her husband, she says, “As a woman, this is the one thing I’m supposed to be able to do, and I can’t do it.”

Adrian talks Lucy into seeing an old friend of his, Dr. Hindle (Pierce Brosnan), the head of a prestigious fertility clinic. The doctor chats about what a genius Adrian was in medical school while he’s probing into Lucy’s vagina, but she doesn’t seem to mind. After all, Dr. Hindle has promised Lucy the best chance of getting pregnant with a new method of IVF that he invented himself.

Meanwhile, at her marketing job, Lucy’s male co-worker tells her that he recommended her for a promotion. “I was like, ‘What about Lucy?'” he says proudly, offering no comment on her actual job performance.

“Greg! You said that?” she gushes, touching him on the leg. “Thank you so much!” Later, she happily offers feedback on a scantily-clad model for an advertisement, observing that the team needs to find model who is more “girl-on-the-subway hot.”

Soon, Lucy learns that the IVF worked—a little too well. Lucy gets pregnant with triplets. In order to avoid complications, she is told she must have a “selective reduction” procedure. She has a choice: Either she can have twin boys or a single girl. Lucy wants to keep the girl. Adrian and Dr. Hindle want her to keep the boys.

By this point, you might expect Lucy to just give in. But for once, Lucy stands her ground against the men in her life: She wants her little girl. Adrian and the doctor agree, and she assumes they are both on her side. This, of course, is her fatal flaw.  By the time Lucy finally realizes that her husband and his medical bro are on a side of their own, it’s too late to save herself. Worse, it’s too late to save her daughter. Lucy’s complacency in the patriarchy—her belief that men would treat her fairly, as long as she was a good, child-bearing wife—not only leads to her downfall, it also ultimately kills her daughter.

Not everything False Positive does in support of this message clicks. A side plot involving a Black midwife named Grace Singleton (played by Broadway actor Zainab Jah) attempts to wrestle with Lucy’s white privilege by intentionally leaning into outdated “Magical Negress” and caretaker tropes. It’s uncomfortable, and the payoff—that Lucy was imagining Grace’s “mystical” vibe the entire time—doesn’t justify the means. Maybe it could have worked if Grace’s character had been more fleshed out, but in the end, it feels underdeveloped.

Still, despite missteps, False Positive offers something new: An empathetic, yet critical take on the passive apathy of women like Lucy. Lucy isn’t a villain, exactly. She’s no Serena Joy, the sadistic, wealthy wife who upholds the patriarchal society in The Handmaid’s Tale. But Lucy is not a sympathetic victim, either.  She floats through her life, allowing men to control her. By the time Lucy finally becomes an active participant, those men have already sealed her fate. They’ve used her body to further their own agenda. Is Lucy being punished? Did she simply fail to prevent her own destruction? Or was this all an inevitable tragedy; an inescapable result of the patriarchy?

Interpretations may vary, but to me, False Positive reads as a disturbing cautionary tale for women of privilege. Lucy may be trapped, but she could have escaped. She just didn’t.

Watch False Positive on Hulu