AUDREY'S CHILDREN - Mark Reviews Movies

Audrey's Children, Blue Harbor Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 27, 2025

Dr. Audrey Evans made some incredible advancements in the treatment of cancer in children, especially neuroblastoma, which develops in nerve tissue and can spread rapidly before a diagnosis is even made. Her accomplishments are a matter of numbers and statistics, which are presented at the end of Audrey's Children. There was the prognosis for children with this disease before Evans' work, and there was one after it. They are startling to consider in terms of the sheer number of children's lives that Evans saved through her research and various medical trials.

It's even more shocking, then, to note that Evans and her story are not as well-known as they probably should be. The filmmakers here deserve credit for bringing attention to the good doctor, who died in 2022 but lived long enough to provide an encouraging coda for the movie. The mere act of telling this story is almost enough to see the movie as some kind of worthwhile endeavor, but its storytelling efforts come up unfortunately short.

Most of those shortcomings, perhaps, come from the portrayal Evans in this dramatization of the very busy but incredibly productive year she had in 1969. The doctor is played by Natalie Dormer, in a performance that's all professional determination in Audrey's role as the head of pediatric oncology at a Philadelphia hospital and intrinsic compassion for every child and parent who comes her way.

The most affecting scenes of director Ami Canaan Mann's movie have little to do with the jargon-filled ones of medical research, debates, and breakthroughs, obviously. Even without knowing any specifics or generalities about the real Evans, we can assume where this story is going as soon as it begins. They usually don't make movies about a tragic lack of success, and it would be especially difficult to imagine anyone making one in which that disappointment has to do with dying children.

That makes multiple scenes of doctors discussing and arguing about this medication, that approach, this corporate sponsorship, or that revelation about the underlying elements of a diagnosis feel doubly perfunctory. The characters here talk with far more knowledge than we likely possess, and after all, every one of those conversations is leading to a resolution that's pretty much inevitable.

No, the real scenes of power here just follow Audrey and her colleagues in the day-to-day grind of meeting new children who arrive at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, checking in on these young patients as their treatment usually fails to address the tumor or tumors that have developed, and knowing that no amount or level of surgery or radiation treatment will save a child's life. "Grind" is putting it lightly, and we can see it almost constantly on the faces of Audrey, Dr. Dan D'Angio (Jimmi Simpson), Dr. C. Evertt Koop (Clancy Brown), and recently arrived resident Dr. Brian Faust (Brandon Micheal Hall).

It's a kind of existential devastation that might go a long way to explain why they're so determined. This is not only to save the lives of numerous kids under their care and everywhere else in the world. It must be, in some way, a little and understandably selfish, just so they don't have to witness the deaths of more children. The performances from those other mentioned actors go a long way to portray just how emotionally draining this work in this era must have been.

Julia Fisher Farbman's screenplay goes back and forth between scenes of Audrey digging through as much information as she can find with her colleagues—mainly Dan, who becomes her right-hand man, despite his hesitation about how she doesn't always go by the book—and those heart-wrenching moments in offices, at hospital bedsides, and anywhere else where the pressure of so much despair and death becomes overwhelming. Along with the doctors, we meet a few patients or families, too, with Kate (Evelyn Giovine), a new mother from Tennessee whose baby might have the best chance at this hospital, and young Mia (Julianna Layne), who is terrified and angry upon her arrival but who gradually comes to trust Audrey about much more than the doctor's "magic medicine."

This story puts the filmmakers into an unenviable position to tell it. How many scenes with these kids can they present without the movie falling into utter despair or coming across as cheaply manipulative? How much of that research can they portray without losing us in the vocabulary or making us feel as if the movie is evading the terrible truths happening just alongside that hopeful angle of this tale? There is an admirable balance here, but it almost comes across as a bit too calculated, too, as if the filmmakers determined that giving each element about half of the story is a fine medium between hopelessness and optimism.

It's difficult to accept that formula, as well as the somewhat formulaic and clichéd parts of the biographical side of the story, as being entirely honest about this situation, at this time, and with all of the challenges in front of Audrey and her fellow doctors. Audrey's Children tells an undeniably important story about work that needed to be done and the person who spearheaded it (not to mention other compassionate innovations having to do with the housing of the families of children in the hospital's care). The movie simply and unfortunately isn't quite the right way to tell it.

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