Private Life: The Most Honest Film About Infertility Ever Made

Most films about infertility are about hope. They follow a couple through difficulty and arrive, usually in the final act, at the pregnancy that was always coming. The difficulty exists as a device — something to endure before the reward. The resolution is understood to be coming. This is why most films about infertility, however well-intentioned, don't actually feel like infertility. They feel like a story about infertility with a narrative arc that infertility itself conspicuously refuses to provide.

Private Life, the 2018 Netflix film written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, does something genuinely different. It doesn't resolve. It doesn't provide the arc. It sits in the specific, exhausting, darkly funny, profoundly human experience of a couple in their mid-forties who have been at this for a long time, whose bodies have been medically managed for years, who love each other and are also driving each other slightly mad, and whose story — at the point the film chooses to end — is simply not over yet.

It is the most honest film about infertility that has been made, and if you haven't seen it, and if you can handle watching something that will sit close to your own experience without offering the comfort of resolution, it is worth watching.

What It Gets Right That Other Films Get Wrong

The film centers on Rachel and Richard, a couple in New York. He's a writer and theater director. She's a writer. They are in their mid-forties. They have been through multiple IVF cycles, and when the film opens they are navigating donor eggs — specifically, the particular strange intimacy of asking someone in your extended circle to donate.

The first thing Private Life gets right is the specificity of the medical experience. The injections, the monitoring appointments, the waiting rooms, the results delivered by phone in a tone that gives nothing away before it gives everything away — these are rendered with an accuracy that comes from lived experience. Jenkins has spoken about drawing on her own fertility journey in making the film, and it shows in every detail. The film knows what it feels like to have your body become a medical project. It knows the specific indignity and the specific hope that coexist in that experience.

The second thing it gets right is what extended infertility does to a marriage. Rachel and Richard love each other — this is never in doubt — and they are also in the particular dynamic that sustained high-stakes shared difficulty produces: the different emotional timings, the different coping mechanisms, the moments of grace and the moments of failure, the way two people can be completely aligned on the thing they want and still be rubbing each other raw with how they're navigating it. The film doesn't sentimentalize the relationship or make it a story about how infertility brought them closer. It shows them, honestly, in the complexity of what they actually are.

The third thing it gets right is the dark humor. Infertility has its own specific comedy — the absurdity of certain aspects of treatment, the gap between the clinical language and the emotional reality, the moments when the only available response to something is to laugh because crying has been done so many times already. Private Life finds this humor and uses it without diminishing the grief. The film is genuinely funny in places, and the comedy doesn't soften the difficulty — it sits alongside it, as it does in real life.

Kathryn Hahn's Performance

Rachel is the central figure of the film, and Kathryn Hahn's performance is one of the most accurate depictions of a woman navigating extended infertility that exists in any medium. She shows us someone who is exhausted — bone-deep, years-long tired — and still going. Someone whose hope has been tested enough times that it has a different quality now than it had at the beginning: more defended, more complicated, less innocent. Someone who is trying to keep her life, her work, her marriage, and her sense of herself together while also going through something that is taking everything she has.

What Hahn captures that is most valuable is the simultaneity. Rachel is holding grief and humor and love and frustration and determination and exhaustion all at the same time, and this is exactly what extended infertility actually feels like. Not a sequence of emotions but a complicated, simultaneous stack of them that has no clean resolution.

The Donor Egg Arc

A significant portion of the film involves Rachel and Richard pursuing egg donation from Sadie, a young woman who is Richard's niece by his previous marriage. This storyline captures something specific about the donor egg experience that most infertility content doesn't address: the strange intimacy of it, the gratitude that doesn't quite know how to express itself, the way the transaction — however much love surrounds it — remains a transaction with its own complexity.

The film handles Sadie's perspective with genuine care. She's not a plot device. She's a person with her own feelings about what she's doing, her own reasons, her own complicated relationship to this family and this situation. The inclusion of her perspective is one of the things that makes the film more than an infertility story — it's a story about family and belonging and what it means to bring people into your life in the ways that are available to you.

On Not Resolving

The choice Private Life makes to not resolve — to end where it ends, without the pregnancy, without the definitive outcome either way — is its most important artistic decision and the thing that most accurately represents the experience it's depicting.

Infertility doesn't resolve on narrative schedule. It doesn't arrive at a clean ending at the point where a story would choose to close. It continues — through the cycles and the waiting and the decisions and the grief and the hope and the more cycles — until it does resolve, one way or another, often long after you thought you'd know by now.

Ending without resolution is the film's way of telling the truth about the experience rather than the story we'd prefer the experience to have. It's uncomfortable. It's also honest. And for people going through infertility, the honesty is more valuable than any comfort a tidy ending would provide.

Why It's Worth Watching

Private Life is not an easy watch. It will sit close to your experience in ways that are sometimes painful. There will be moments of recognition that produce something between relief and grief — the relief of feeling seen, the grief of what's being depicted.

But recognition has its own value. One of the persistent difficulties of going through something that isn't widely depicted accurately is the feeling of singular isolation — the sense that what you're experiencing is too specific, too complicated, too resistant to narrative to be understood or shared. Private Life is evidence that it isn't. That someone understood it specifically enough to make it visible. That the thing you're going through is real and has been seen by someone who got it right.

Watching it with your partner may be particularly useful. Not because it will make things easier, but because it can surface things that are difficult to find words for — things that are true in your own experience that it helps to see named in someone else's.

Watch it when you have the emotional capacity for something that's going to be close to the bone. Don't watch it on the night of a bad result. Watch it when you're in a window where you can sit with something difficult and let it move through you rather than hitting you when you're already at capacity.

And after: talk about what it surfaced. That's usually where the value of watching something this honest actually lives.

Note: Private Life is available on Netflix. Rated R. Running time approximately 123 minutes. The film contains scenes depicting IVF procedures, pregnancy loss references, and explicit discussion of infertility treatment. It is recommended for adults navigating fertility treatment who have the emotional bandwidth for content that will closely reflect their experience.

Reflect

These questions are for after watching, or for anyone who has already seen it.

Which moment in the film sat closest to your own experience? What did it feel like to see that specific thing depicted accurately?

If you watched with your partner: was there something the film surfaced about the other person's experience — or your shared dynamic — that was hard to see but worth seeing?

The film ends without resolution. How did that land? Is that something you identified with, or something you found hard to sit with?

What It Offers That Support Groups and Articles Don't

There's a particular kind of understanding that comes from narrative — from watching characters you care about move through something real — that is different from the understanding that comes from information or from community. It's more visceral. It bypasses the part of you that manages and presents and explains, and reaches something more immediate.

Private Life offers this. It's not a documentary, not a support resource, not an educational tool. It's a piece of art made by someone who went through this, about people going through this, with enough specificity and honesty that watching it feels like being understood at a level that most depictions of infertility don't reach.

The specificity matters. The particular way Rachel moves through the medical appointments, the particular texture of the marriage under pressure, the particular dark humor — these aren't generic representations. They're accurate. And accurate representations of experiences that are commonly isolated and commonly misunderstood do something real for the people who have those experiences: they reduce the sense of aloneness that comes from feeling like what you're going through is too complicated to be seen.

That reduction of aloneness is not a small thing. On the days when the fertility journey feels most isolating — when the gap between your internal experience and the lives of the people around you feels widest — evidence that someone understood it specifically enough to make a film about it is a genuine form of compan