Get Out was a watershed moment for genre filmmaking, showing the myriad ways that a gifted filmmaker with a distinct perspective can use horror to speak to social issues. Like many groundbreaking, zeitgeist-defining movies, it also spawned – and continues to spawn – weaker imitators that tried to clone Jordan Peele’s formula to address other populations and issues. Ilana Glazer and John Lee’s False Positive is the latest version, attempting to mimic Peele’s keen sense of symbolism and metaphor to make a statement on womanhood and pregnancy, but it lacks the vision to make it stand out.

Glazer, who co-wrote the script with Lee, plays Lucy, a married, upwardly mobile professional who’s been trying to get pregnant with her husband Adrian (Justin Theroux) for over two years. Lucy agrees to see Adrian’s former teacher Dr. Hindle (Pierce Brosnan), a brilliant fertility doctor, and the couple are thrilled when their IVF treatment produces triplets.

Shortly after she becomes pregnant, Lucy starts experiencing paranoia and hallucinations. She overhears conversations between Adrian and Dr. Hindle that sound like they’re planning something behind her back. She has visions involving blood and drowning. Something is definitely wrong, something more serious than “mommy brain,” but every time Lucy discovers information that proves her fears, someone else invariably gaslights her. No spoilers, but anyone with an ounce of knowledge about recent news stories involving fertility doctors or, for that matter, Lifetime movies, can figure out where this is going.

The idea behind False Positive – that women don’t get to control their own bodies or have their decisions respected in even their most vulnerable state – is a good one. However, it lacks personality. Lucy feels like a blank canvas; we know almost nothing about her, and she doesn’t seem to have any friends. She’s almost always surrounded by men at home, during her fertility treatments and at her marketing job, but apart from the obvious visual message that sends, we don’t know how Lucy feels about any of it, particularly before she gets pregnant. This is particularly odd given that Glazer is a dynamic performer and writer, easily capable of giving her character an inner life that gets the audience to care about her.

The film is also defined by a muted production design and cinematography from Midsommar’s Pawel Pogorzelski that sometimes manages to transcend the film’s cold, clinical remove, but more often than not further accentuates it. While that approach makes sense given the story it’s telling, because the rest of False Positive already feels flat, this only serves to dull things down even more.

Perhaps the issue is that False Positive feels like it should be a much angrier film than it is. It’s subdued when it should be screaming, internalized when it should be throwing things around and pointing at its central message with a middle finger raised high. Peele certainly got that; so did Emerald Fennell when she tackled another harrowing part of the female experience in Promising Young Woman. Glazer has proven throughout her career that she’s capable of doing it with aplomb. It’s disappointing and unfortunate, then, that her foray into genre filmmaking is a whimper instead of a bang.