Joy review | A cuddle-and-a-crumpet British drama

thomasin McKenzie in joy on netflix
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The quest to develop IVF plays out in predictable and thoroughly heartwarming fashion in Ben Taylorā€™s Netflix film. Hereā€™s our Joy review.


Picture the scene: James Norton, looking less like Happy Valley’s rotten ruffian Tommy Lee Royce and more like an overenthusiastic biology postgrad, is desperate to convince a colleague of his revolutionary idea. What if, he posits with the scientific professionalism of a vaguely northern labrador, we could fertilise an egg outside the womb? What if we could produce an embryo in, to pick a piece of lab equipment entirely at random, a test tube?

The colleague isn’t convinced. “We’ll unite them all against us”, Bill Nighy’s character reminds him. The church, the medical establishment, the media. But Doctor Marley & Me has his trump card. “We’ll have the mothers”, he whispers. The score swells; Nighy’s eyes twinkle; history is made.

If that sort of thing induces in you an eye roll rather than an “aww”, then Joy really isn’t for you. Go on, leave. I’d shoo you out of the cinema with a broom, but Ben Taylor’s capital-b British underdog story is heading to Netflix a week after release, and I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that pretending to be a chimney sweep doesn’t work if I go in via the roof.

The story of the birth of IVF (penned by Jack Thorne from a story collaboration with his wife, Rachel Mason alongside Emma Gordon and Shaun Topp) follows in the Billy Elliott, Made In Dagenham, Pride tradition of heartwarming British drama. It’s a template the film doesn’t do much to deviate from, but then it’s a template for a reason – this is peak rainy Sunday viewing, best done with a cuddle and a crumpet (the press screening I attended declined to offer either).

Well-meaning and occasionally ripe, Thorne’s script centres the IVF story around Thomasin McKensie’s Jean Purdy – the nurse who would come to face a long battle for recognition in the technique’s inception. Joining scientist Robert Edwards (Norton) and surgeon Patrick Steptoe (Nighy), the trio battle naysayers, newspapers and (in Jean’s case) family to find, in Robert’s words, “the cure for childlessness”. 

Read more: We Live In Time review | You’ll need a lot of tissues for Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh weepie

The monumental highs and lows that come with the fertility story territory are sensitively done, and it would take a heart of particularly icy stone not to shed even the beginnings of a tear somewhere along the journey. A few slightly over-egged performances (Norton’s Edwards veers dangerously close to an All Creatures Great And Small parody at times) and an occasional reticence to delve into the less hopeful aspects of the story to make the joyful moments sing hold it back from becoming a new classic of the genre.

Still, if you’re in the mood for a gentle, uplifting drama about an under-recognised scientific breakthrough, you could do a lot worse. Joy is a rare film that probably suits home viewing better than the big screen, if for no other reason that it practically demands a nice cup of tea while you watch it. Lovely.

Joy premieres at the BFI London Film Festival on 15th October, ahead of a limited UK cinema release from 15th November. It streams worldwide on Netflix from 22nd November.

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