Critics reviews

It’s the product of a satirical ambition that lacks the wit to land any heady blows; the horror mastery to be even glancingly scary; the intellect to make those thrills invigoratingly existential; and the sense of humor to make it entertaining. What it is, is limp, dull, half-cocked — with a few good performances from good enough actors that hints at how a smarter movie might have worked.

Despite [the film's] promising set of influences, "False Positive" fails to cohere. Glazer and Lee’s script scatters its thematic attention in the last third, which ruptures the movie’s attempt to build dread, and director Lee creates a thin, under-realized world.

Has human brainpower really deteriorated to the point where we need every movie’s ideas spelled out for us in signpost letters? "False Positive" has a lot going for it... but [it] doesn’t sustain its most suspenseful ideas... Thoughtful moviegoers want, and deserve, filmmakers to trust their intelligence, but "False Positive" doesn’t extend that good faith. It’s a moderately effective horror movie with a much better, creepier and more nuanced one nestled invisibly alongside, the unborn twin ghost of a movie that might have been.

As the film crashes to a conclusion, early promise fading away, the film has the feeling of a valiant, but misguided, post-Get Out attempt to infuse social commentary within the framework of well-worn genre territory, aiming high but landing low. "False Positive" is pregnant with possibility but, ultimately, not much else.

A deftly made suspense film, but one that falls somewhat short of its aspirations, both as a satire and as a psychological thriller with a critical societal eye.

[The film] aspires to be a modern version of “Rosemary’s Baby,” but ultimately lands somewhere between tepid and confused...Despite its vaguely unsettling clinical ambience, very little about the film as it makes its way to an ultimately flat and predictable final twist manages to feel tense or thrilling. Or even funny for that matter.

It’s Glazer, impressively flexing her dramatic acting skills, who draws us in and keeps us there...Indeed, she and Lee focus so effectively on the repulsion of Lucy’s daily humiliations that they wind up giving the genre conventions short shrift... But the frayed strands of the horror plot feel hastily woven together, and underwhelming when all is revealed.

Whether it boils down to the insistence on remaking a cinematic staple, an unwillingness to look to the genre’s multifaceted depictions of pregnancy and birth, creative laziness or a fatal combination of all of the above, "False Positive" fails to deliver... [Even its] shortcomings are uncharacteristically boring, generic and empty.

With each meticulously framed shot and an appropriately old-school horror movie score ramping up the tension, “False Positive” does a slow build to a deeply twisted and grotesque and memorable climax that makes Lucy’s nightmares seem like sweet dreams by comparison. With Ilana Glazer leading an outstanding cast, “False Positive” is not a movie you can easily shake off in a day or two. Or three.

Things become surreal and hallucinatory as Lucy loses her grasp on reality in order to come to terms with the truth. But a rushed ending leaves loose ends frayed around the edges and reveals dastardly secrets that are frustratingly predictable. Lucy’s rageful reaction is clumsy and brutish.

Through the performances from Glazer and Brosnan, as well as its unabashed willingness to look extremely silly, "False Positive" may be worth one’s time.

Feeling at times like a new-millennium gloss on Roman Polanski’s "Rosemary’s Baby," "False Positive" threads classic horror-film tropes with a woozy, partially comic sensibility but doesn’t fully commit to this approach... For much of the film, that combination successfully creates an unsettling, if at times over-obvious, sense of unease.