"False Positive" reveals itself to be a bonkers, disturbing riff on "Rosemary's Baby"
False Positive (2021) With chance-taking, firmly independent distributor A24 and against-type creatives behind and in front of the camera, one knows “False Positive” can’t just be a standard-issue potboiler. Initially, with Ilana Glazer co-writing the script with director John Lee (2016's "Pee-wee's Big Holiday") and starring, the film recalls a dead-serious Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig committing to the bit in 2015’s “…from Hell” thriller “A Deadly Adoption,” which seemed like a joke on all of us but did, in fact, air on Lifetime. As by-the-numbers as its general concept would seem, “False Positive” reveals itself to be anything but, flipping the joy of pregnancy into a woman’s paranoid nightmare, particularly when men in the medical field have a God complex. In using genre tropes to mine mommy-to-be anxiety, men controlling women’s bodies, and gaslighting, the film admirably goes to some uncomfortable places with overt shocks and disturbing insinuation. Known best...