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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Peter Bradshaw

Joy review – warm and intensely English portrayal of the birth of IVF

Intellectual odd-throuple of fertility science … James Norton, Bill Nighy and Thomasin McKenzie in Joy.
Intellectual odd-throuple of fertility science … James Norton, Bill Nighy and Thomasin McKenzie in Joy. Photograph: Kerry Brown/Netflix

There is sympathy, warmth and directness – though perhaps not much in the way of explicit joy – in this intensely English true story that made headlines and changed lives around the world.

Screenwriter Jack Thorne and director Ben Taylor dramatise the heartache and strain and triumph that led to the first ever birth of what the press with a mixture of hostility and awe called “a test-tube baby” – that is, a baby conceived through in vitro fertilisation – on 25 July 1978: a little girl called Louise Brown (middle name Joy).

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