Dir. John Lee | Now Streaming On: Hulu | Rating: 1/5

Ding, ding! And it begins! We’re starting off hot, and by hot, I mean hot garbage, with False Positive (2021).

False Positive attempts to grapple with the complexities and nuances of the bodily autonomy of women, but fails miserably. This is one of the most poorly written horror dialogues I’ve ever encountered. It’s unnatural, clunky, and I can’t tell if any of this is supposed to be taken seriously. A direct line from this film is “Your whole thing inspires me.” What reasonable screenwriter is committed to that line?

The story of Lucy and Adrian is barely threaded together and constantly being intercepted by dream sequences with no bearing on the plot. There’s this strange sidebar about Lucy projecting an image of exoticism onto the only woman of color in this film – it’s not a good look, and comes across as being “fake woke.”

The scares in this are nonexistent. Anyone who knows anything about IVF can guess the major twist. Even as someone with a deep fear of obstetrics, I watched this with my eyes glazed over and laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of the ending.

Stylistically, this is a disgrace to the reputation A24 has for itself. The lighting is so bizarre. I felt like I couldn’t see anything this whole film. There’s a few oddly placed upside down camera angles and some cheap looking CGI. Maybe the fact that this was a direct to Hulu release had something to do with it?

This is a must skip, adding nothing of value to the realm of maternal horror in the slightest and one of the weakest I’ve seen from A24.

Know Before You Watch: Features depictions of abortion, miscarriage, death, blood.