In the Flesh: False Positive

Forgive me as I write what is perhaps the most Frasierian sentence of my life, but a professor of mine once posited that when you approach literature through the lens of deconstructionism, you do not remove thematic structure so much as replace it with a structuring absence, like the negative space contained within an archway. In False Positive, a film she co-wrote with director John Lee, Ilana Glazer is just such an absence. Her complete unsuitability as its protagonist, a young advertising creative, Lucy Martin, whose dreams of a perfect family with her husband Adrian (Justin Theroux) are stymied by her infertility, transforms an otherwise tedious Rosemary’s Baby rehash into a truly fucking terrible Rosemary’s Baby rehash. Alongside Theroux, Pierce Brosnan, and Gretchen Mol it becomes painfully obvious just how little talent Glazer has for drama, and how inexpressive she is when called on to perform subtle facial work.

Nor do Lee’s uninspired camera or Pawel Pogorzelski’s murky and ill-defined cinematography do Glazer and her co-stars any favors. The film’s colors are an indifferent jumble, its visual language painfully ham-handed. Lee shoots at a slight slant whenever things are meant to seem a little “off”, inverts his shots to up the ante, and that — give or take the rails of a crib repurposed as prison bars — is about where his bag of tricks ends. What limited deployment there is of special effects is dismal, hacky CGI with no discernible artistic sensibility driving it. A scene in which black fog obscures a child’s face in a dream sequence looks like something out of a CW show, not just unconvincing but, fatally, shooting for realism without the tools to get there. The whole thing looks as though it was shot on an iPhone in an unattended office building after the real camera and lighting crews died in a tragic midair collision. Presumably the set dressers were also aboard.

The film is empty on a level deeper than Glazer’s inert performance and Lee’s uninspired direction, though. Lee and Glazer’s script makes mild, spineless digs at bougie Brooklynites, the conventions of cishet marriage, and the white feminine fantasy of being saved by a nurturing Black woman, but it wants so badly to have its cake and eat it, too that none of these little observations bears fruit. There’s a dull, hollow “girlboss” feel to False Positive’s tale of injustice in the workplace and patriarchal condescension at home and in reproductive medicine. This unpleasantly complacent bent emerges more starkly into view with an anxiety-induced dream sequence in which we watch Dr. John Hindle (Brosnan) and Lucy’s husband Adrian (Theroux) consummate a secret affair, conflating homosexuality with patriarchal self-regard and self-reproduction. The less said about the odious “empowering” violence of Hindle and Lucy’s final confrontation, the better, but suffice it to say that to make a movie in which Pierce Brosnan leans against a freezer literally full of his own cum boring is an achievement in its own right.