Confused By the Twist in Hulu's False Positive? Let's Break It Down

Billed as a pregnancy horror movie, False Positive will have you reeling in discomfort as you watch Pierce Brosnan holding a speculum. The first half of the Hulu thriller movie is a bit of a slow burn as we follow Lucy (Ilana Glazer), a woman who becomes pregnant after visiting Dr. John Hindle (Brosnan), a renowned fertility specialist who taught her husband Adrian (Justin Theroux). Her joy over her pregnancy quickly fades as she starts suspecting that her doctor and husband have somehow been manipulating her. If you find yourself scratching your head over that wild ending, you're not alone. Ahead, we break down that strange third act to clear up the confusing twists.

Let's go over some context before we fully dive into the ending. Things first take a turn when Lucy learns that she's pregnant with a set of male twins and a female singleton. Dr. Hindle brings up selective reduction, and both Hindle and Adrian suggest they remove the female fetus. Lucy insists on keeping the girl, and everyone seemingly consents to this when she undergoes the reduction procedure.

As the pregnancy develops, so do Lucy's suspicions towards Dr. Hindle and her husband, both of whom become the subjects of her freaky hallucinations à la Rosemary's Baby. The men discourage her from seeing a midwife named Grace (Zainab Jah), whom Lucy consults anyway. Telling her that she has "mommy brain," Dr. Hindle puts Lucy on a low dose of Xanax. But her suspicions do appear to have some merit: After snooping around, Lucy discovers her husband making out with Dr. Hindle in a hotel room. When she breaks open her safe at home, she also finds a file on her that more or less looks like Dr. Hindle has been stalking her every move. Whether or not the make-out session is a dream is a bit unclear, but the room number does appear to be the safe code.

Lucy ends up delivering two healthy twin boys, which wasn't what she wanted. She later visits Grace, whose office ends up less mystical and much more clinical than when they first met — Grace explains that it's always been that way, which hints at Lucy's confused state of mind. When Lucy heads to Dr. Hindle's clinic to confront him, she comes across a few bombshells. First, there's the shocker that Adrian is joining Dr. Hindle's practice. Then, there's Dr. Hindle's own twisted secret: He's been impregnating patients with his own sperm. Upon learning this, Lucy pummels Dr. Hindle to a pulp and destroys his fridge of sperm samples. She also injects his nurse with a needle full of an orange liquid that's potentially lethal. She leaves the office with Wendy, the selectively reduced fetus that came out with her placenta during the birth.

And so the ending takes us back to the beginning: Lucy wanders the streets with a bloody face after her brawl at the fertility clinic. When she gets home, she seemingly tosses the twins out her window, but they somehow ascend into the sky. This weird moment seems to be a hallucination of sorts. Briefly after, she hands off the twins to Adrian and screams at him to go. Lucy then takes out Wendy to breastfeed her, and shockingly, Wendy begins latching and breathing.

Is Wendy really breathing, though? It's hard to tell when Lucy's being gaslit by the creepy men in her life and when she's hallucinating, but this instance appears to be a hallucination of sorts. Of course, it's all up to your interpretation. The one thing that's for sure is that False Positive is a thought-provoking film that will stick in your head for a while.