[Mother of Fears] Paranoid Pregnancy in False Positive

Welcome to Mother of Fears – a monthly column that will explore the various roles that mothers play within the horror genre. Mothers are a staple feature in horror movies, and yet, their stories, motivations, representations, and relationships with their children are so varied and complex that we never feel like we’re watching the same story twice. Every month I will take a look at a different mother from the world of horror, explore their story, and look at how they fit into the broader representation of women in horror.

The horror genre often confronts the lengths couples will go to in order to add a child to their family, and False Positive (2021) looks at young couple Lucy and Adrian as they consider the next step in their fertility journey when they are unable to conceive naturally. 

Adrian’s former teacher, Dr John Hindle, is a leading fertility doctor in New York, and so when Lucy is confronted with another negative pregnancy test, Adrian suggests they visit Dr Hindle to see if he can help. Lucy is disappointed, as she wanted the whole experience to be “natural”, but she is so keen to finally fall pregnant that she agrees to go along with the procedure. And this is really the beginning of Lucy’s picture-perfect vision of what her pregnancy would be like falling away in front of her as those around her start to control her and dictate what happens with her body. 

As Lucy lies on the medical table, clearly uncomfortable as Dr Hindle performs the procedure, it’s far away from conceiving with her husband in their own bed as she dreamed. Meanwhile, as Adrian masturbates into a cup while watching porn of a woman being choked, he seems nonplussed at the change in circumstances. Either way, he gets an orgasm and a baby, so it really doesn’t matter to him what happens. 

Soon after, Lucy finds out the procedure has been successful, and she is pregnant with three babies. Because the twin boys share a gestational sac and the single girl is on her own, Dr Hindle suggests a selective reduction procedure, which would involve terminating the girl to ensure a healthy pregnancy without putting too much pressure on Lucy’s body. 

However, it turns out Lucy has always dreamed of having a little girl. After the death of her mother, Lucy is desperate to recreate that mother/daughter bond that she has been missing so much. She wants to name her daughter Wendy, after the character in the Peter Pan (1911) book that her mother read to her as a child. Despite Dr Hindle and Adrian's insistence that it would be better to keep the twin boys, Lucy has her heart set on Wendy and decides to keep the single girl baby instead. 

Once pregnant, Lucy starts to realise the full extent of how her life is going to change. To begin with, she finds a group of expectant mothers to become friends with because she knows her single friends who like partying won’t understand what she’s going through. And while there’s no instant connection with these women just because they’re pregnant at the same time, at least Lucy feels she is able to openly talk about her IVF journey and her experience with Dr Hindle. 

She also starts to experience problems at work. While her coworkers are initially delighted that Lucy has achieved her dream of getting pregnant, and love commenting on how much she’s glowing, she soon loses the big account she was just given and finds herself back getting everyone’s lunch orders again. Initially, she comments she’s looking forward to having it all with her growing career and her new baby, but reality quickly hits that it will be difficult to keep up the momentum in her career if she has to take time off to care for her child. 

The final straw for Lucy happens when she starts to fear that Dr Hindle has done something to her unborn baby, and Adrian is unwilling to listen to her. She takes various trips back to Dr Hindle’s office during which he accuses her of reading too much nonsense on the internet and getting herself worked up or simply fobs her off with drugs. No one wants to listen to her or the way she is feeling. Everyone thinks they know better than her, even though she trusts her body, and all this causes her to push herself further away from both Dr Hindle and Adrian as she tries to find someone who will listen to her concerns. 

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Her final hope is Corgan, one of the other mothers from her expectant mother friend group, who had also experienced problems with her own baby. Lucy reaches out to her and explains her worries about Dr Hindle, even showing Corgan a file on her she found in Adrian’s drawer, implying that the two men are conspiring together for some reason. 

She believes Corgan is on her side, that the bond they share as women and as pregnant mothers is enough to forge a friendship and the female connection that Lucy is desperately looking for in a situation where she feels controlled by men. However, it turns out Corgan has recently become Dr Hindle’s patient as well, and as she values her pregnancy much more than her friendship with Lucy, she immediately betrays her. 

It is here that Lucy goes into labour, and while she initially decides to go to a spiritual midwife instead of Dr Hindle, when she finds out she is actually pregnant with the twin boys and there are complications, she ends up in Dr Hindle’s office anyway. This is yet another example of no one listening to Lucy and what she wants to happen to her body. In the aftermath of the birth, Lucy lies stunned as the two boys are laid on her chest. 

She’s told that she should just be happy to have any babies at all, but this isn’t the birth or the outcome that Lucy wanted. For Lucy, it seems like it was never about just getting pregnant and having a baby. It was really about wanting a little girl to help her grieve the pain of losing her mother. The twin boys aren’t going to help her work through this situation because she never wanted them, and no one seems willing to discuss her feelings about it all without painting her as selfish and inconsiderate. 

Lucy decides that in order to work through her issues, she needs to confront Dr Hindle about the whole situation and find out what happened. And while she’s at his office, she discovers that Adrian is planning to join Dr Hindle’s practice. This Rosemary’s Baby (1968) reveal means that Lucy realises that Adrian knew everything Dr Hindle was doing to her, including terminating the girl baby directly against Lucy’s wishes. 

Feeling utterly betrayed by everyone in her life, Lucy decides she has nothing left to lose and sneaks into Dr Hindle’s lab to see the full extent of what he’s been up to. In there she finds the reduced female fetus which was removed when she gave birth to her sons. Dr Hindle reveals that he impregnates all his patients with his own sperm to ensure the best babies possible. He also purposely terminated Lucy’s daughter because he only wants to produce male babies to continue his bloodline. 

Full of the rage that has been building for nine months, Lucy finally unleashes it all on Dr Hindle and severely beats him before destroying his stock of sperm. She then takes her daughter's body with her and heads home. 

Standing over her sons in their cot, Lucy regards the babies while covered in blood. It’s clear there’s no connection there for Lucy, and she imagines herself opening the window and letting her babies float away into the night. Lucy has a deep relationship with Peter Pan, and it is almost as if she’s sending the babies off to Neverland so they can live their life as Lost Boys, without a mother, but happy and safe. 

When Adrian returns home, she hands him the babies and tells him to leave. After literally punching Dr Hindle out of her life, she pushes Adrian out as well. These two men have brought her nothing but pain and have forced their opinions on her from the start. Adrian’s betrayal to enhance his career is something she knows she will never be able to get over, and she also recognises that she’ll never be able to be the mother the boys need when all she ever wanted was Wendy. 

Finally alone with her daughter, Lucy removes Wendy’s body from the bag and attempts to breastfeed her. After a few moments, Wendy starts to move and feed, and Lucy finally looks happy and relaxed for the first time in nine months. Much like sending her unwanted sons out the window, this is an idealised version of a very hard situation as Lucy desperately tries to cope with the bad things which have happened to her. 

In this moment, she feels like she can forget everything that has happened so far if only she can have Wendy in the end. While she knows in reality that will never be possible, she needs to have this moment of peace, to look at what her life could have been.

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