Joy review: These test tube baby pioneers deliver a real bundle of joy, writes BRIAN VINER
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Joy (12A, 124 mins). Verdict: Uplifting tale. Rating:. Pub quiz enthusiasts have always known the name of the first 'test-tube' baby. The question pops up a lot, and the answer is Louise Brown. But it's her middle name that gives Ben Taylor's film its heartwarming title. Evidently, at the invitation of Louise's ecstatic parents, it was conferred by the medical team who made their daughter's life possible. Fittingly, they chose Joy.
![[To create dramatic tension, major obstacles must stand in the way. Here, the establishment is dead against what they are trying to do]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/11/15/01/92094501-14085061-image-a-64_1731634008981.jpg)
The film stars Bill Nighy, James Norton and Thomasin McKenzie as the British pioneers of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), the treatment from which Louise was born in July 1978 . In some ways it reminds me of The Social Network (2010) and The Imitation Game (2014), even Oppenheimer (2023). They are all stories about complex breakthroughs that have to be told compellingly, because we know the ending even before the lights go down.
![[The film's challenge is to make the myriad complexities of early IVF research accessible to today's audience]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/11/15/01/92093751-14085061-image-a-58_1731632923236.jpg)
To create dramatic tension, major obstacles must stand in the way. Here, the establishment is dead against what obstetrician Patrick Steptoe (Nighy), physiologist Robert Edwards (Norton) and embryologist Jean Purdy (McKenzie) are attempting to do. In Edwards's words, that, simply, is 'to cure childlessness'.
![[In some ways it reminds me of The Social Network (2010) and The Imitation Game (2014), even Oppenheimer (2023), Brian Viner writes]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/11/15/01/92093827-14085061-image-a-59_1731633017259.jpg)
Once the trio have joined forces in 1968, Steptoe anticipates the hostility they will face. 'The Church, the state, the world... they'll throw the book at us,' he says. The film stars Bill Nighy , James Norton and Thomasin McKenzie as the British pioneers of in vitro fertilisation ( IVF ), the treatment from which Louise was born in July 1978.
![[As Steptoe, Nighy delivers his standard set of soft-voice and fluttery-hand mannerisms, but he's convincing as the doctor compelled by the forces of stuffy disapproval to pursue his dream in an outbuilding behind an Oldham hospital]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/11/15/01/92093749-14085061-image-a-57_1731632918396.jpg)
