Hulu’s horror film False Positive aches to evoke the sick, helpless, enveloping dread into which Mia Farrow’s character so famously descended in Roman Polanski’s 1968 classic Rosemary’s Baby.
But the film — co-written by Glazer and her Broad City colleague John Lee, who directed — has bigger ambitions, which causes it to double down on the notions of patriarchal manipulation roiling just under the surface of its first reel.
This narrative pile-up serves the plot, but it underserves the characters, as we get precious little time to watch Lucy and her husband Adrian, for example, simply share a space, or reveal anything about their lives together before the film joins them.
The film’s ending reaches for something that exceeds its grasp, and the reveal of What’s Really Going OnTM has been foreshadowed so early and so bluntly that the viewer will likely have long before dismissed it as a red herring.