Mirroring the difficult fertility journeys faced by so many couples, Joy, a dramatisation of the scientific journey towards in-vitro fertilisation, unfolds as a series of stop-starts, false dawns and heartaches.
The screenplay by Jack Thorne – the playwright behind Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and screenwriter of Enola Holmes – recounts the events leading up to the birth of Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first “test-tube baby”, in 1978, telling the story from the perspective of Jean Purdy (played by a luminous Thomasin McKenzie), a young nurse and embryologist.
The arduous research behind the procedure brings her together with striving scientist Robert Edwards (James Norton) and paternal gynaecologist Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy, characteristically warm). They have a dream: to help any woman who wants a child.
No one is on their side, not even the scientific community. The Nobel Prize winner James Watson predicted: “All hell will break loose, politically and morally, all over the world.” Members of Jean’s church congregation and her mother (Joanna Scanlon) turn against her. Newspapers and graffiti evoke Frankenstein.
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Over a decade, Jean enjoys an adorable, ill-starred romance with a colleague (Rish Shah), walks away from the programme to tend to her ailing mother, observes Louise Brown’s embryonic cell division under a microscope, and is informed that contemporaneous science can do nothing to alleviate her endometriosis.
With spot-on lead performances and canny supporting players, not least Tanya Moodle as an operating-theatre matron, who elevate a nuts-and-bolts script, Joy makes space for the “ovum club”, which brings together Purdy and those women who know that their part in the IVF programme is more likely to benefit future participants than it is they themselves. The film, which always feels like classy telly rather than a pioneering effort befitting its subjects, might have made more of this dilemma.
The historical details lend poignancy nonetheless. Purdy died from cancer at the age of 39, in 1985. She lived long enough to see hundreds of children born around the world via IVF. But not the many millions that followed.
On Netflix from Friday, November 22nd
