This article contains major spoilers for the False Positive ending. You can check out our spoiler-free season review by clicking these words.
In the A24 and Hulu film Ilana Glazer plays Lucy, a woman who has struggled to get pregnant — until her husband Adrien (Justin Theroux) schedules an appointment with the charming and mysterious Dr. Hindle (Pierce Brosnan). When the procedure succeeds and Lucy becomes pregnant, she has frequent, bloody visions (and instances involving actual blood), and starts to suspect that Adrien and Hindle are plotting behind her back.
After the ultrasound reveals triplets, Lucy and Adrien are forced to choose between twin boys and a girl, as carrying all three to birth would be deadly. Lucy wants a girl (who she names Wendy, like from Peter Pan) and she convinces Adrien to “reduce” the boys. As the treatment becomes more uncomfortable, Adrien seeks out an alternative in the form of Grace, a midwife who emphasizes “natural” birth.
Towards the end, Lucy finds in Adrien’s safe a file detailing her every move, she brings it to her friend Corgan, who finally takes her seriously (after attributing her previous worries to “mommy brain”). Later, Lucy finds out that Corgan has been seeing Dr. Hindle as well, and has been in communication with Adrien. She claims that Adrien never had a safe in his office in the first place.
Then, in a birth sequence shot like a nightmare, Lucy delivers twin boys — and Wendy’s fetus as an afterbirth. An excess of blood causes Grace to send her to the hospital, where Hindle takes charge once again. She comes out shaken from the experience; from being lied to and deceived. But when she returns to Grace, Lucy is shocked to discover that she is not how she remembered. “I am not your mystical negress Lucy,” Grace says. It’s a shocking moment, that puts what we’ve seen before into perspective; much of what we saw of Grace was filtered through Lucy’s preconceived notions of the “natural,” which included putting a black woman in a much more “spiritual” and “tribal” role than she actually is.
While many of her hallucinations can be attributed to a combination of “mommy brain” and whatever Hindle was feeding her, but the birth of the twins has a far too human explanation. When Lucy returns to Hindle’s practice he reveals his true nature and the movie reveals its as well.
“God doesn’t make babies, I do,” he says, reveling in his own prowess. Hindle espouses several Q-esque phrases, hinting at his twisted worldview by saying that he gave Lucy, “the best genes there are” — his. He made her have boys to “spread the seed.” The disgusting, eugenics-adjacent language shows him to be the chief misogynist; the one who has taken away Lucy’s autonomy to propagate the patriarchy. He’s no mystic, just a talented scientist with an evil, albeit far too common, worldview.
Lucy manages to smash a mirror over his head, then destroying the fridge containing vials of his semen. His means of propagation literally destroyed. She steals the fetus of Wendy, the girl she always wanted, and heads home (hence the blood-soaked Lucy we saw in the opening).
After having a vision of casting off the two boys into the window and watching them float, Peter-Pan-like, into the sky, Adrien returns home. He’s known Hindle’s plan the whole time — in fact, he agreed to do it for a job. In exchange for being cucked (sorry), he now works at Hindle’s practice.
“This will be a good thing for us,” he tells his blood-soaked partner, somehow not getting the plot despite being in the same movie as her. She gives him the baby and walks off. Taking Wendy, she cradles the fetus to her breast and starts to see it move. ‘Who Am I,’ from Leonard Bernstein’s 1950 Peter Pan musical plays; and never has a child not growing up ever felt so sad.
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