‘Joy’ Review: Thomasin McKenzie and Bill Nighy Fight the System to Pioneer IVF in a Crowd-Pleasing Medical Biopic

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Joy” has been a much-used title in recent years, one that a new film about the battle to develop in-vitro fertilization treatment justifies recycling once more with a late-film reveal: It was the middle name given to Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first so-called “test-tube baby,” and the first successful outcome in over a decade of agonized, controversial medical research.

But joy is also the primary MO of this debut feature from British TV comedy director Ben Taylor (“Sex Education,” “Catastrophe”), which assigns itself the somewhat tricky task of fashioning an uplifting audience-pleaser from story material in which moments of elation are considerably outnumbered by those of crushing heartbreak.

To this day, after all, the odds are stacked against women applying for IVF, given its daunting success rate (still well below 50%) and sometimes prohibitive costs: While at least 12 million children have been born via the procedure in the last 45 years, many more remain the unrealized dream of their parents.

Jack Thorne’s script for “Joy” navigates this tonal challenge by focusing its narrative on a woman not undergoing the treatment, but heavily invested in it just the same: Jean Purdy, the young British nurse who joined an otherwise male-dominated fertility research team as an assistant in 1969, before becoming more integrally involved as an embryologist in the years leading up to Brown’s game-changing 1978 birth.