Story | KOKO NTUEN

Photos | SHERVIN LAINEZ

CD + Styling | PHIL GOMEZ

Makeup | REBECCA RESTREPO

Hair | MATHEW MONZON

Digital Editor | SAM BERLIN

Motion Director | JULIA PITCH

DoP | GEOFF TAYLOY

Editor | SARA SOWELL

Colorist and Color House | @NTROPIC

“Why does it have to hurt?”

Ilana Glazer and I have just arrived at a mutual conclusion while dissecting the complexities of OB-GYN care in America: speculums and lubricated ultrasound probes often feel like tools used for alien abduction. It’s absurd — and yet, deeply familiar.

I relay a story to Glazer of getting emotional with a Nurse Practitioner who did a gentle Pap smear on me. She handed me tissues for the tears streaming down my face as I told her, “Thank you for being so kind.”

“There is something that has been continually clarifying in my pregnancy,” Ilana says, seated in a makeup chair, her signature curls half-obscuring her face. “It’s horrifying — the reality that women are second-class citizens across every socioeconomic level, all over the world. And on a varying degree of wealth and race, all these qualifiers that fit us into boxes. The unspoken violations, ranging from minuscule to enormous and egregious, are constant. I had a gynecologist tell me as well, “This is gonna hurt.” It’s like, why is it?”

I’ve never seen anyone in a more laborious state. Within the next few weeks, she is due to give birth to a baby and her feature-length debut on Hulu. Co-written with longtime collaborator John Lee, False Positive is a bizarre mix of horror and fantasy.  It’s a disorienting psychological horror set against the sanitized backdrop of fertility treatments. Ilana calls it “a horror movie about the patriarchy as it’s expressed through medicine — and pregnancy medicine in particular.”

It’s a very different story than I am used to for entertainment. A mindfuck really and unlike anything I expected from the Broad City star — haunting, provocative, and deeply unsettling.

Watching False Positive is like a fever dream. Rosemary’s Baby would be too easy a comparison, this film is a dark twisted tale of patriarchy and women’s bodies that seems to crawl into you. Ilana’s character, Lucy, moves on the screen in muted colors, wearing fine jewelry, married to Justin Theroux. She is flawlessly hard-working and put together. They live a cushy New York life, one of wall-to-ceiling windows and apartments with clawfoot tubs, expensive health insurance, and jobs in the haute bourgeoisie class. It looks perfect on paper. First comes love, then marriage but then the stalled baby in the carriage has them painfully going through the motions of trying to get pregnant.

The subject of fertility is jarring for most as a conversation starter,  False Positive immediately turns the lens into the lives of a couple going through infertility treatments. Within the first few minutes, the lexicons of the female body are normalized as the viewer embarks on a deeply personal, intimate, and uncomfortable journey that is a conversation often reserved for couples. Pierce Brosnan on screen as Dr. Hindle is a triggering reminder of the many tops of the male doctor heads that have been poking and prodding in my own body. The diagnosing of sonograms, and lab results while I lay open on a cold table. It’s sinister in style, but more so an unsettling commentary on the American healthcare system. Even though Lucy and Adrian’s doctor visits are in beautiful spaces using high-grade instruments, the film shows how the Goliath of the healthcare industry sucks you in alive. The, “That’s just how it is” nightmare of it all. Lucy seems to be fighting back against this, leveraging her privilege while highlighting it.

Grace Singleton, another Hollywood heavyweight that stars in the film, gives way to a beautiful arch that highlights Glazer’s devotion to intersectionality and ignorance. One of the film’s most cutting scenes features Grace Singleton, played with quiet force, delivering a line that slices through Lucy’s polished facade: “I am not your mystical negress, Lucy.” When I bring up the scene, Ilana nods deeply.

“Without Grace’s part, I think the story is meaningless,” she tells me. “Intersectionality is the key to this awakening. If we don’t include it, there is no awakening. I’m interested in modeling white ignorance — not to shame it, but to explore it, to expose it. It thrills me, honestly. It’s scary, but it’s also an invitation. If I can model it first, maybe it becomes less scary for others to face.”

Ilana Glazer has always been a disrupter. Her rise through Broad City introduced us to Ilana Wexler, a weed-smoking, sex-positive, absurdist feminist who turned awkwardness into power. It was physical comedy with a sharp edge — somewhere between Lucille Ball and Kramer, but with a very 21st-century soul.She became the quirky meme next door that you wanted to be friends with or have a conversation about race relations over a joint and a beer in the park. Since then, she’s expanded her portfolio with precision. From co-starring with Scarlett Johansson in Rough Night to standing opposite Pierce Brosnan, Ilana refuses to be typecast. And yet, reinvention is no longer a risk for her — it’s a calling.

“I think now that I have some distance from Broad City, I finally have a body of work beyond it,” she says. “It’s like when Bob Dylan picked up an electric guitar or when Miles Davis did Sketches of Spain. I’m in a phase where reinvention actually feels safer than staying the same.”

That reinvention, of course, extends to her role as a soon-to-be mom. She speaks of it with a quiet intensity — not in grand proclamations, but in the calm of someone who has done the work to arrive here.

“I’m going to give birth, and I’m really looking forward to the next few months,” she says. “Spending time with this brand new human who’s mine. Stepping outside a system where my worth is tied to quantity or productivity. I’m excited to resist that. The resistance itself inspires me.”

Chain Link necklace + rings, FIAT LUX. Gold Necklace, TELFAR. Dress, KKCO.

Earrings + Rings, FIAT LUX. Look, BAJA EAST.

Coat, LARUICCI. Dress, GCDS.  Shoes, JEFFREY CAMPBELL.

Entire look, GUCCI.

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