Film Review | Netflix

Joy (2024) — an IVF drama too concerned with gentility to fully deliver

Three pioneers (a nurse, a scientist, and a surgeon) defy church, state, and medical norms to achieve the world’s first ‘test tube baby’, Louise Joy Brown.

Screenwriters Jack Thorne (Enola Holmes), Emma Gordon, and director Ben Taylor (Sex Education) dramatise the research and experimentation of the first test-tube baby. The heartwarming and quintessentially British real-life story of Joy follows the doctors, nurses, and scientists who helped conceive the first baby through in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

When Louise Joy Brown was born on 25 July 1978, she was considered a medical miracle, but some religious figures argued that scientists were playing God. Joy simplifies these conflicts into a watchable but twee drama.

The film is an ode to Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie), the embryologist nurse who was the forgotten driving force behind the research. She carried out groundbreaking research while caring for her ailing, religious mother (Joanna…