False Positive

A woman who desperately wants to get pregnant begins to suspect that her fertility doctor and her husband are conspiring to drive her mad in this middling psychological thriller.

The filmmakers of “False Positive” would very much like you to know that “mommy brain,” a state of confusion and mental frailty endemic to new mothers, is a real thing, as this phrase is repeated a number of times throughout the psychological thriller. It’s about a woman who desperately wants to get pregnant who begins to suspect that her famous fertility doctor and seemingly perfect husband are conspiring to drive her mad.

Come to think of it, “Mommy Brain” would’ve been a better title for this middling picture.

Are they really lined up against her, or is she just cracking under the strain of hormones and seismic shifts in her life? I’ll leave it to you to find out, though the recent cinematic fixation on women undergoing gaslighting (“The Invisible Man”) by meanie men should lend a clue.

Ilana Glazer stars, produced and co-wrote the screenplay with director John Lee, so this is a fairly rare example of a horror film — or at least horror-adjacent — with a strong female sensibility to it. She plays Lucy, a thirtysomething marketing whiz who has spent the last few years trying to get pregnant with her husband, Adrian (Justin Theroux), a reconstructive surgeon who’s supportive and dreamy to boot.

Dr. John Hindle is the best fertility innovator in the biz, and usually women have to wait 18 months or more to get an appointment. Luckily, Adrian studied under Hindle in med school and they’re able to get in right away, where Lucy is assured that his cutting-edge techniques can get her preggers lickety-split. This is exactly what comes to pass.

Hindle is played by Pierce Brosnan, who is so good-looking he might as well belong to another species. Perfectly polite and attentive, with silver hair and beard, Dr. Hindle may have airs of being an egomaniac, but he’s the kind who can back it up with results. 

His clinic has a Stepford Wives feel, all white and sterile, with nurses (Gretchen Mol is the lead) who seem like they stepped off a supermodel runway rather than nursing school. Everyone talks in calming, pleasant tones and you just feel like everything’s going to be peachy.

Lucy is very joyful to become pregnant, and it even looks like she’s in line for a big promotion at work. She makes friends through a pregnancy support group with other expecting 1-percenters (Sophia Bush plays one), and they do ladies’ luncheons and cute baby showers and so on.

Things start to go awry when Lucy finds out she is pregnant with not one, but three babies — twin boys and a girl. She really had her heart set on a girl, planning to name her Wendy in honor of her lifelong love of “Peter Pan.” But Dr. Hindle and Adrian say she’s likely to lose all three unless she agrees to “selective reduction” — aka abortion — and they are strongly pushing to keep the boys.

Soon Lucy begins to experience hallucinations, becomes paranoid, starts snooping around on Adrian and find out he’s been snooping around on her, etc. She seeks out a feminist midwife (Zainab Jah) who teaches that the medical profession is a male-dominated conspiracy that wants to wrest the natural process of childbirth away from women and control their bodies.

Things go on from there, wandering into familiar horror-movie power dynamics and moist outcomes. Let’s just say the doctor’s insemination tool gets employed in a way that can’t be recommended in the user manual.

Oddly, I found the movie pretty compelling during the first couple of acts, but the last half-hour feels stale and predictable. Lucy will emerge from her confusion cocoon and take up the righteous mantle of wronged mothers everywhere. It’s stronger when she, and we, are kept more in the dark.

When it comes to scary movies, it’s usually best to expect the expected.