April 6, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Ami Canaan Mann
Culture Representation: Taking place in 1969 (and briefly in 1974) in Philadelphia, the dramatic film “Audrey’s Children” (based on true events) features a predominantly white group of people (with a few African Americans) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: Dr. Audrey Evans, a chief oncologist who works at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has conflicts with her peers and superiors over her radical idea of how to give a new treatment to people with cancer.
Culture Audience: “Audrey’s Children” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching dramatic movies about medical breakthroughs that are based on true stories.
“Audrey’s Children” can get formulaic and clunky in telling the true story of Dr. Audrey Evans, a diligent oncologist whose unorthodox ideas led to breakthroughs in medical treatments for cancer. However, this drama’s performances and story are compelling. The movie is not a full biopic because it covers mostly just one year in the life of Evans, who died in 2022, at the age of 97. The movie mostly takes place in 1969, which was a pivotal year for Evans and oncology medicine.
Directed by Ami Canaan Mann and written by Julia Fisher Farbman, “Audrey’s Children” had its world premiere at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, where the movie won the Tribeca X Award for Best Feature. “Audrey’s Children” begins in 1969, by showing a scene at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, also known as CHOP. Dr. Audrey Evans (played by Natalie Dormer), an immigrant from England, is showing a young girl who’s a cancer patient that she has nothing to fear from a radiology machine that needs to be used on her for a test. (For the purposes of this review, the real people are referred to be their last names, while the characters in the movie are referred to by their first names.)
To show the girl that she won’t be harmed, Audrey has brough a rabbit from the hospital’s test lab and uses the machine on the rabbit to prove that the rabbit won’t be harmed. Dr. Brian Faust (played by Brandon Micheal Hall), an eager learner who is Audrey’s resident physician, speaks to her in the hallway after this demonstration. Brian tactfully reminds Audrey that rabbits are not allowed in the patient’s quarters. Audrey’s response is to cheerfully tell Brian to bring the rabbit back to the lab. As far as Audrey is concerned, this rule was broken for a greater good.
This scene sets the tone of what’s to come in how Audrey handles what she wants to do to make progress in her research and do what she thinks is best for her patients, even if she breaks rules and gets resistance from her colleagues. The movie soon shows that Audrey (a bachelorette with no children) is someone whose life revolves around her work. She was recruited to join the hospital as chief of oncology, a leadership position that women rarely had at the time. Audrey has impeccable credentials, but her style of working and communication clash with others who want to do things in a stricter, more traditional manner.
At home, where she lives by herself, Audrey is shown to be a little bit of an eccentric. She has a stuffed lamb that she talks to like it’s a little kid. When she practices a speech in front of the lamb, she says how she’ll change her speech: “I’ll be less oncologist-y.” she then kisses the lamb and puts it back on the shelf.
Audrey has a soft spot for animals and children. For example, she insists that the animals in her lab get treated with kindness and respect. Her child patients all get compassion and doting care from her, which is in contrast to the no-nonsense and stubborn way that she often interacts with her work colleagues. There’s a scene in the movie where she’s training some resident doctors on how to give injects to lab animals. One of the doctors giggles at her method. Audrey immediately and coldly dismisses him from the lab for the day.
Audrey’s insistence on doing things in the way she wants is also on display in the scene where she first meets Dr. Dan D’Angio (played by Jimmi Simpson), a radiation oncologist who also does research at the hospital. Dan meets Audrey for the first time when he finds her sitting at a desk in his office, with her feet up on the table, as she’s reading his mail. It’s downright rude for Audrey to do this, and she brushes off Dan’s comment that it’s illegal to open and read other people’s mail.
Audrey is unflustered when she gives criticism to Dan about his treatment diagnoses. She also comments that the hospital’s waiting room is “dreary.” She says how she thinks the waiting room’s ambience could be improved: “An aviary would do wonders.”
She delivers these cutting remarks in a way that is perky yet sassy and blunt. Dan is taken aback by his strong-willed woman. And although they have conflicts throughout the story because rule-following Dan wants to do everything “by the book,” Audrey and Dan end up becoming close allies.
Audrey wants to try what was a radical idea at the time: combination chemotherapy, which would mix approved medicine in low doses with radiation chemotherapy. This method, also called a staging system, has proven to be effective in treating leukemia. But at the time, it was an untested method for treating neuroblastoma, a type of cancer that starts in early nerve cells called neuroblasts.
Audrey is excited about this research and tells her supervisor Dr. C. Everett Koop (played by Clancy Brown), who is CHOP’s surgeon-in-chief (and who would later become U.S. Surgeon General from 1982 to 1989), that she can’t wait to get started on the research. However, Everett tells her it will take about one year for her research application to be approved. Audrey tells him that she and her patients don’t have time to wait one year. You know where all of this is going, of course.
The movie sometimes has scenes that look very contrived and probably didn’t happen in real life. For example, there’s a scene where Audrey tries to convince Everett to approve her research as he is swimming laps in an indoor pool. In order to get his attention, Audrey jumps into the pool while wearing her work clothes. Everett agrees to look at her preliminary study results but tells her she has a two-week deadline.
Meanwhile, Audrey takes on an additional crusade that doesn’t have to do with scientific research. She notices that families of CHOP’s cancer patients often have to travel from out of the area so that the child patients can get the cancer treatment or clinical trials. These family members often have to cut the treatment short and have the patient discharged because they can no longer afford the cost of staying in hotels. And so, Audrey goes on a fundraising mission to buy places where family members of these patients can stay for free. Her efforts lead her to become a co-founder of Ronald McDonald House Charities.
“Audrey’s Children” sometimes clumsily balances these two crusades that Audrey juggles at the same time. A lot of it looks very “only in a movie” simplistic because it’s presented in the movie as Audrey being the only person with the unwavering driving force to get things done. She gets help from Dan, Brian and Dr. Laurie Naiman (played by Jeff Panzarella), who works at the rival Keystone General Hospital. Audrey is presented as the only one who doesn’t doubt her plans.
Audrey sees the benefit of hospitals working together in advancing cancer research instead of trying to be competitive with each other for a research breakthrough. Everett and CHOP’s board of directors don’t see it that way, as Audrey flaunts the rules about doing research that wasn’t approved by her supervisors. It all leads to an inevitable showdown.
In every story like this, there’s a villain. And in “Audrey’s Children,” the villain is Dr. Jeremy Lewis (played by Ben Chase), a jealous doctor at CHOP who tries to turn Everett, Dan and other colleagues against Audrey by calling her an attention-seeking troublemaker. Jeremy is a sneaky gossip who does everything he can to get Audrey suspended or fired. Jeremy also tries to persuade Everett and others that the sponsorship money that Audrey obtained for her research could be put to better use for other research.
Part of Audrey’s charitable generosity starts in her own home. She invites a young single mother named Kate Watson (played by Evelyn Giovine) from Tennessee to stay in Audrey’s home for free while Kate’s baby son Charlie Watson (played by Dominic Sacchetti) gets cancer treatment at CHOP. Charlie is one of the patients who becomes part of Audrey’s combination chemotherapy trial. However, Kate can’t stay at Audrey’s place for an extended period of time, so it motivates Audrey even more to get temporary housing for families in need.
Audrey also becomes emotionally attached to a cancer patient named Mia McAlister (played by Julianna Layne), a 7-year-old girl with neuroblastoma. Her parents Alvin McAllister (played by J.P. Edwards) and Rita McAlister (played by Kat Murphy) agree to have Mia undergo Audrey’s unauthorized clinical trials for the combination chemotherapy. There’s really no suspense on what the outcome will be because a movie wouldn’t be made of this story if it didn’t have the expected outcome.
“Audrey’s Children” show some of the sexist barriers that Audrey came up against in her quest. For example, she successfully convinced a cranky home owner to sell his house to the hospital after he insisted that he meet her husband. Audrey had Brian pretend to be her husband. But when Audrey goes to a bank to apply for a mortgage, she finds out she can’t get a mortgage without a man to co-sign on ownership of the house.
Dormer gives an admirable performance in showing how Audrey is an unstoppable force of nature, even when she gets discouraging setbacks and opposition. The supporting cast members are very capable in their roles. There’s noticeable chemistry between Audrey and Dan, but he’s married, so they keep things strictly professional in this story. The movie has an epilogue that tells what happened in real life to the story’s main characters. “Audrey’s Children,” although not a perfect or surprising movie, can appeal to many types of viewers and is inspiring in all the right ways.
Blue Harbor Entertainment released “Audrey’s Children” in select U.S. cinemas on March 28, 2025. The movie will be released on digital and VOD on May 6, 2025.
